Hugh Steers: Strange State of Being

In Sleeping Cat (1988), Steers depicts two nude men in bed. One man is asleep, a black cat curled up tightly next to his chest. Steers often included cats in his compositions as visual signifiers of his subjects' emotional states. In this composition, the cat's restfulness serves to underscore the deep somnolence of the lax man. In contrast, his companion is awake and perched awkwardly on the edge of bed. He reaches out to lightly touch his sleeping partner as if he to reassure himself that all is well, seemingly unaware of the snake slowly winding its way up his leg. This enigmatic and surreal tableau recalls the art historian Gerard Haggerty’s observation about Steers’s paintings, “Their … execution suggests the urgency that accompanies the delivery of news in a moment of crisis, or the need to set down vivid dreams before they fade from memory.” A dream-like scene, Sleeping Cat obliquely articulates the anxieties of the AIDS epidemic, its imagery inviting viewers to construct their own narratives around sickness, companionship, and the danger of desire.

Before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1995, Hugh Steers created a series of emotionally-charged paintings that directly or obliquely address the devastation of the epidemic. These melancholy images amplify the artist's own hopes and fears, exploring diverse issues like mortality, isolation, defiance, and compassion.

Emerging from this body of work, Two Men and a Woman (1992) depicts a woman bathing a man in a bathtub as another figure assists. Suffused with a tenderness wrought from suffering, the composition's soft light and exaggerated perspective underscore the poignancy of the scene, as well as the nude man's vulnerability. Ultimately, the touching image recalls Steers's assertion, "A lot of my art has to do with that primal idea of drawing a painting of the hunt on the side of the cave. … It's like a conjuring. I would like to be able to act or have someone care about me the way some of the people in my paintings act or care about each other. It's as if painting it will make it become real."

Hugh Steers created work that was designed, in his own words, "to draw the viewer in through the lure of a comfortingly recognizable style and then confront him with a subject matter of a challenging nature." This subject matter, while rarely explicit, always obliquely dealt with AIDS and the devastation of the epidemic, touching on various themes, including loneliness and alienation, as well articulating the fear of one's body slowly succumbing to a deadly disease.

In Clean Up (1987), Steers paints a nude man cleaning up after another, who has passed out on the bathroom floor. Emphasizing the passed out figure's vulnerability, the artist underscores the havoc AIDS wrought in even the most intimate of spheres as its victims and their loved ones were forced to confront the grim realities of the illness. At the same time, for Steers, bathrooms-spaces that are simultaneously sterile and dirty, private and universal-typified the disease. As he argued, "it ties in with the illness. The bathrooms represent culture and instinct in collision. … America, has a horror of it and an obsession with cleanliness and mortality."

In Bandages (1992), Steers paints a male figure, nude except for diaper-like bandages, examining his neck in a bedroom mirror. The ambiguous image is haunted by the specter of AIDS. The disease is obliquely referenced not just by the bandages the man wears, but also by his actions-studying his lymph nodes to see if they are swollen-and the three large bottles of pills that rest on the desk in his room. Capturing the precarity and uncertainty of the illness, Steers's canvas evokes the emotional devastation of the epidemic, in which individuals were forced to confront the vicissitudes of the disease alone with little hope of recovery.