Acrylic on canvas

50 x 70 cm

Unframed

Cruising the Clearing is part of the more playful closing movement of the gallery: a group of paintings where bodies, flowers, birds, trees and strange visitors seem to share the same unruly life force.

Here, a small red male figure stands exposed in a bright green and yellow clearing, arms raised, trousers dropped around his ankles. The marked pubic hair makes the body unmistakably sexual, but the painting refuses shame. The figure is comic, vulnerable, triumphant and oddly innocent all at once - caught between public exposure, private pleasure and a childlike burst of colour.

Surrounded by blue branch-like lines and wild green grasses, the body becomes part of the landscape rather than separate from it. Within the final six works, the painting adds a sharper queer note: playful, erotic, open-air, and unapologetically bodily.