Claude MarQuis makes paintings that refuse to look away. Over three interconnected series, he turns the language of desire, shame, and violence into portraiture — placing words that were meant to wound directly onto the bodies of men painted with authority, dignity, and unflinching care.

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Some of the works draw on the visual traditions of religious iconography — saintly halos rendered in gold paint, figures posed with the quiet gravity of devotional painting — and then detonate that reverence with text that society has used to police, demean, and erase. The collision is the point.

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STR8 M

These portraits of bearded, conventionally masculine men are surrounded by the verbatim language of gay cruising profiles: "Str8 WM versatile BTTM into jockstraps looking for hung daddy." "Str8 WM into businessmen, glory holes & poppers." 

 

The Grindr logo appears at the bottom of each canvas like a signature — or a receipt.

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These men present themselves to the world as straight. The text tells a different story, in their own words. MarQuis neither mocks nor condemns — he simply makes the private public, with the same unfussy matter-of-factness the men themselves used when they typed those profiles at midnight. The painting does what the closet cannot: it holds both things at once.

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SLUT

Masculine men — bearded, broad-shouldered, dressed in suits or rendered bare-chested — wear the words that have long been weaponized against women: slut, whore, skank, tramp, bimbo, bitch. Sometimes the words ring the canvas. Sometimes they appear as tattoos carved into the skin itself.

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The halo returns here, rendered in gold paint, elevating these figures to something approaching sainthood.

A man in a blazer, eyes averted, haloed in gold, sits beneath the word WHORE in block letters. A shirtless figure with devil horns and tail wears SLUT / WHORE / TRAMP / SKANK like a crown of thorns rewritten. Another — nude, bearded, saint-like — carries BITCH tattooed above an anchor on his shoulder blade.

The effect is not humiliation. It is redistribution. When these words land on male bodies, their architecture is suddenly visible: the contempt was never really about behaviour. It was always about control.

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FRUIT · FAIRY · FAGGOT

The third series reclaims the slurs aimed at gay men, placing them on figures of deliberate physical power and beauty. A shirtless, tattooed man with a full beard and a saint's halo stands before a burning orange background. FAIRY blazes across the top. FRUIT runs down the left. FAGGOT climbs the right. A pink triangle — the Nazi symbol reclaimed by queer activists — marks his chest.

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In another canvas on the same burning field: HOMO blazes across the top, SISSY down the left, PANSY up the right. A double-Mars tattoo marks his arm. A butterfly rests on his torso. He meets your eyes without flinching.

A third figure — younger, horned, shirtless — blazes red against deep blue, ringed by a gold-paint halo. The French-Canadian slurs PÉDÉ, FIFI, TAPETTE surround him. His body is covered in tattoos: a pentagram, a bull skull, "Hail Satan" inscribed in Hindi, Tamil, and Arabic. He is not asking for your acceptance.

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The iconography of martyrdom runs through all three series, but it reaches its culmination here: these are not victims. They are men who have taken the worst language thrown at them and wear it like armour.

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About the Series

Claude MarQuis is the founder of Throb City Art Collective, an Ottawa queer art community, and has curated queer artist exhibitions at T's Pub, Ottawa for five years.