VSF Seoul is pleased to announce Sebastian, Alex Foxton’s (b. 1980, England) first solo exhibition in Asia. Foxton’s elegant and boldly colored paintings have captured the attention of an international audience. Engaging with the complexity and ambiguity of masculine archetypes, Foxton mines familiar figures - soldiers, sailors, cowboys, saints, and kings - entwining them with personal narratives and an eye to the tenderness and terror that can lie beneath these images.
This body of work reflects Foxton’s long consideration of historic representations of Sebastian, an early Christian saint who famously survived being shot through with so many arrows by his fellow Roman soldiers that he looked like a sea urchin. Long a favorite subject of European painters, Sebastian is most often depicted as a beautiful, muscular, mostly nude figure, seductively tied against a post or tree, his face more ecstatic than pained, his body pricked and bleeding all over with arrows. These images reflect a common theme in both Catholic art and transgressive philosophies: That suffering can be an ecstatic path to the pleasure of redemption.
As an archetype, Sebastian has often captured the imagination of the LGBTQ community. There is a transgressive pleasure in the beauty of the figure, the panoply of penetration, and the dynamic metaphor of power and submission in the classic representations of Sebastian. At times, Foxton nudges the viewer toward these complexities with some directness, as in a work titled Sebastian (for Pier Palo [Pasolini]) or The Archer, which illustrates the virile shooting figure, also in the nude.
Foxton’s representations of Sebastian tend to eschew the characteristics of iconic works by Botticelli, Mantegna, and Bazzi (Il Sodoma) as described above. Rarely do we see him pierced by arrows, though Foxton does depict the shooters. Often his body is presented only in part or as only the head, rather than in full length contrapposto.
