Andy Warhol was cool. He defined it. He still does. He was also gay, and peer-pressured in his professional life to stifle it…

Therein lies the drama of Sholem Krishtalka’s extraordinary new exhibition of paintings at Jack the Pelican, entitled “An Opera for Drella,” after Lou Reed’s Songs for Drella.

Yes, Andy earned the nickname Drella for his combination of diabolical charisma and innocence: Dracula + Cinderella. If you already know the stories, all the better. This is an insider’s feast, fleshing out situations that were never in actuality exposed to the camera. Krishtalka has instead pieced the scenes together, imagined and inferred them from snippets of the first-person accounts of those who were there (or sometimes perhaps more from dramatic necessity).

Derek Larson’s YESTERDAY’S CODE

What he creates is a vividly intimate historical fiction of how it all must have felt, more personal than anything dragged out from the official archives and very much at odds with Warhol’s carefully-cultivated, even-tempered popular persona. We are made to feel the ponderous depths of self-consciousness. It is painful. And, at the same time, wildly poignant. Filled with romantic longing. And deeply touching.

In the words of the artist—

It is based on a bit of gossip that I came across concerning Andy Warhol: that Warhol wanted to befriend Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (who were dating at the time). He wondered why the pair were so stand-offish with him, and he asked the documentary filmmaker Emile De Antonio (known affectionately to the Factory crowd as Dee), who told him the awful truth: that Warhol was too gay, and the closeted art power couple feared that proximity to Warhol’s swishiness would ‘give them away,’ reveal their homosexuality to their milieu of dealers and collectors. I have created an opera out of this bit of gossip, a cycle of narrative paintings whose story of unrequited love unfolds as a series of tableaux and vignettes. It is an opera of looking but not touching, wanting but not having.

We see them all; they’re hanging out, talking and not talking, looking at each other and not looking—Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg and many of the marvelous and provocative characters who populated his world—Joe Dallesandro, Edie Sedgewick, Susan Sontag, Ondine, Ultraviolet and others… We recognize them immediately from their signature, camera-ready styles and postures. Krishtalka is very attentive to details of manner and dress. A veritable textbook.

But he is even more attentive to attitude and state of mind. It is in this, under the romantic spell of his stormy, dark psychological realism, that his characters come alive.

Derek Larson’s YESTERDAY’S CODE

The artist’s restrained, yet robust painterly directness is reminiscent of Manet. It’s a language well-suited to the nature of his gaze. We’ve always looked askance at their depths. As we were meant to. Now, we’re looking in. Connecting in a very personal way. Warhol knew that celebrity in the media age depended on packaging one’s personality into a readily consumable icon, emptied out of overmuch serious content. To see them now like this, if we allow ourselves, strangely enough…it is shocking.

But then again… An opera is a grand pretense and what we’re really seeing here is the re-enactors. The artist, who is also a gifted art critic and works in a popular Toronto gay bookstore, is himself a well-known figure in the city’s gay community. These are his friends and members of his social network, getting into their roles. And loving it. He casts, dresses, poses, photographs and then paints them to fit. He is Warhol. He wants them to camp it up. They don’t need much encouragement. Krishtalka sees it on this level as a mapping of his own social circle. The paintings exist for him at the intersection of personal and public history. He writes:

It is based on a bit of gossip that I came across concerning Andy Warhol: that Warhol wanted to befriend Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (who were dating at the time). I avow the use of camp as the means and the end of my opera; camp provides a theoretical bridge between Warhol’s world and mine, a means to collapse and fold the iconic into my own personal vernacular, and also to project my persona onto larger public cosmologies. Generally speaking, my work is a deconstruction (or, perhaps more aptly, a reconstruction) of my own life; it is a document of my relationships, and an attempt to create a kind of philosophy of my queerness.

Sholem Krishtalka lives and works in Toronto. He received his MFA in 2006 from York University in Toronto and his BFA in 2001 from Concordia University in Montreal. He has had five solo shows in Canada. This is his NYC debut. Since 2006, Krishtalka has been a regular contributor to Xtra! magazine.