Sebastians
The artist composes a series of floral arrangements and audio pieces that dialogue with depictions of Saint Sebastian throughout art history.  Sebastian’s martyrdom by arrows has captured the imagination of artists since the Middle Ages, and persists as a symbol of homosexual desire and persecution in contemporary visual culture.  With references to artworks by François-Xavier Fabre, Derek Jarman, Yukio Mishima, Kent Monkman, and Glyn Philpot, Nemerofsky’s compositions reach out to the enduring erotics and affects Sebastian’s martyrdom inspires; seeking contact not only with the icon itself, but also with the feelings of fascination, identification, and desire of generations of artists.

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The title for this project, tofeelclose, came to me during recent conversations with Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. 

I met the artist at a time in my life when I felt immensely unsure of myself. At a party, where I knew only two people, he uttered a few gentle words of introduction and set me at ease for the rest of the evening. I remember that now, as I have the privilege of working with him once again, only because it feels as if the presence of his gesture, his arrangements, have been part of my mental landscape for a very long time. 

In 2016, Nemerofsky debuted À fleurer, at AKA, a new floral work inspired by correspondence between the French author Colette and Henri-Louis Mermod, published as a collection of essays titled “Pour Un Herbier.” Despite the artist’s physical absence from the gallery, the intimacy he wove through his own personal letters transferred through the hands of his collaborators. A florist who interpreted Nemerofsky’s writing into arrangements. A printmaker rushing out a new set of prints of the artist’s own writing. Then at 12:15 a weekly phone call from another country, with his voice filling the gallery. We revisited this work together with Natasha Chaykowski, for a project in Athens, wherein local writer and composer Kiriakos Spirou picked a hillside blossom in response to letters from Nemerofsky. Through À fleurer, the artist formed a kind of closeness with the respondents to his letters, who adopted an intimate faithfulness to the fulfillment of his gesture. When I think back on the works, I imagine Jill Wirges, a florist who is an artist in her own right, gingerly walking the five blocks to AKA with her selected flowers through -40C weather; Kiriakos Spirou ruminating through Athenian hillsides with the artist’s words in his mind, arranging the chosen stem with his elegant hands, tipped with glittering, green fingernails. 

When we spoke in March, although it had been years since our last encounter, and most of our relationship has taken place online, it registered that I have always left our conversations with a familiarity that transcended the reality of how much we know one another. Nemerofsky is adept at forming a genuine, long-distance nearness.

Continuing to work in this elegant language, Sebastians reaches back through history in connection with a centuries long homage to Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier persecuted for his Christian beliefs. Messianic in depiction and persecution, Saint Sebastian is a decidedly different icon than Christ himself and notably free from the cross. Fittingly he was remembered and venerated during times of plague. He is also upheld as the patron saint of soldiers, archers, and athletes; a Christianized Apollo. Somewhere in the 20th century, and possibly even earlier, Saint Sebastian become an icon for Queer communities and the patron saint of homosexuality.

Perhaps it was the visual attention given to his body throughout history, a transformation of his portrayal, a male depicted with the typical lush sexuality applied to the bodies of women, as offerings for the male gaze. Or was it the exquisite violence which his body endured? Countless arrows penetrating the tender places of his limbs and joints, a kind of abject pleasure. Certainly part of his symbology is given meaning by the countless artists who have taken up a conversation or particular vocabulary around the Saint. 

Following his imprisonment for consensual homosexual acts, Oscar Wilde adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, allegedly a combination of Saint Sebastian and the protagonist of “Melmoth the Wanderer” (written by Wilde’s Uncle, Charles Maturin). Tennessee Williams penned the poem “San Sebastiano di Sodoma” and wrote the tragic character Sebastian in the play “Suddenly Last Summer” (1959). Yukio Mishima describes the desire conveyed by Saint Sebastian in Guido Reni’s painting St. Sebastian (1615) in his “Confessions of a Mask” (1949). Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dalí both take up the subject of Saint Sebastian in their works, respectively as poet and artist, and reference him in their correspondence framing their rumoured romantic relationship. Kent Monkman includes Saint Sebastian in his Artist and Model (2003), Miss Chief Eagle Testickle painting a portrait of a white, buff, cowboy tied to a tree, impaled with arrows; complex symbols of colonialism, sexual identity, and Indigenous power. These and others noted by Nemerofsky — Derek Jarman, Cy Twombly, Pierre et Gilles, Glyn Philpot, Juul Kraijer, Louise Bourgeois — are only a few representations with which the artist’s Sebastians are joined.

In Sebastians No. 1, the first composition to be followed by subsequent arrangements and audio accompaniments, Nemerofsky poses blooms in meaningful placement. Full of his invisible hand, laden with an intimacy befitting Saint Sebastian, the arrangement is a bow and arrow, an erect phallus, a fresh youthful floret. The lines, piercing one another, are clear and strong, softened with a gentle curve. The loose leather ribbon has both a pending violence and a restrained grasp. As I have before, I ponder what the physical collecting of this lisianthus and this wildflower felt like, looked like, where its purpose took Nemerofsky through the streets of Paris. I imagine other invisible parts comprising this resulting record of the artist’s hand and his contemplation of the enduring Saint.

Sebastian’s martyrdom and sainthood have gathered such a spectrum of allusions: spirituality, agony and pleasure, masculinity, strength, purity, healing, that his role as a figurehead seems to be at once broadly accessible and highly personal. Here, Nemerofsky’s use of arrangements weave together the dynamic symbolism of the still life, the layered connotations of flowers, the alchemical meaning of his integrated objects, and hints at floral commemoration and gift giving. Making this work a piece in a long line of tributes to Saint Sebastian, and Nemerofsky kin to artists empowered by the martyr.

Tarin Dehod

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montreal-born artist, diarist, and researcher based in Paris. His artistic work mediates emotional encounters with musical, art historical, and queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. In his work you will find audio guides, bells, bouquets, ceramic vases, enchanted forests, folding screens, gay elders, glitter, gold leaf, love letters, imaginary paintings, madrigals, megaphones, mirrors, naked men, sex-changing flowers, sign language, subtitles and the voices of birds, boy sopranos, contraltos, countertenors, and sirens. His work has exhibited internationally, and is part of the permanent collections of of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, The Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Thielska Galleriet Stockholm, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

The artist wishes to thank Bastien Pourtout, Anabelle LaCroix, and the Fondation Fiminco, for their contributions to the production of Sebastians.