Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Sleeping Boys II, 2024, archival giclée print, 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm (Credit: Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez; Courtesy of David Peter Francis, New York)

If Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s current exhibition Survey at David Peter Francis had a smell, other than that of East Broadway’s markets wafting through the third-floor windows, it would be that sweetly sour stench of unwashed, slept-in sheets and stale dry-mouthed morning breath. A man dozes, his face pushed hard into the white-sheeted bed while his blonde hair tumbles over the edge of the mattress. Another man, in black-and-white, looks away with his bare back exposing a similarly poor sleeping form. Ferris Bueller reclines on his bed, staring into the camera, as played on a TV screen embedded in the back of an airline seat. A color photograph of bleached-out, light pink sheets and a horridly tacky headboard joins an illustrative figure of three punched pillows (a Robert Mapplethorpe?), a studious collection of drawings of even more pillows, and a photograph of a hand holding open a book to another photograph of Félix González-Torres’s billboard of an empty bed (itself a photograph), looming over the water towers of the Manhattan skyline.

Granted, it’s strange to relate to Reyes Rodriguez’s photographs with such an earthy smell, or really, any physical presence, olfactory or not. Like a lot of Pictures Generation-influenced contemporary (re-)photography, there is something removed about the formal rigidity of Reyes Rodriguez’s exhibition. Except for Kyle/David, which features a man holding up a pen drawing of Michelangelo’s most beautiful boy in the world’s face over his own, the show consists of rephotographed found and personal images strung together by variously constructed metal frames, some zigzags, others grids, and yet others curved pipes like industrial rainbows. This imagery floats within a wide expanse of deep black nothingness. Yet, leaning in and squinting at the smaller imagery while trying to ignore my own hulking shadow, there is a captivating intimacy within the source photographs, as well as their dreamlike logic when taken together, that asserts a poetic narrative about presence and absence in queer history and archives.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Figure II, 2024, archival giclée print, 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm) (Credit: Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez; Courtesy of David Peter Francis, New York)

The foundation for Survey, according to the show’s press release, is a box of images Reyes Rodriguez discovered in 2020 in Mexico City where the now Vancouver-based artist is from. One of these photographs is the aforementioned snoozing blonde stomach-sleeper—a picture that reveals the original male photographer’s fondness, if not desire and outright queer identity. As art writer and curator Diego del Valle Rios points out in Reyes Rodriguez’s video Portrait: Technonir, which captures an expert culling of this Mexico City man’s archive alongside journalist Adriana Gallardo, “You don’t take a picture of just anyone asleep.” That’s for sure. It’s through watching this video on Reyes Rodriguez’s website that I could pinpoint a couple of other images in Survey as originating from this mystery man’s box. This includes the two glamour shots of a woman (presumably) friend in a turban with a puff of curly bangs, impressively large circular earrings, and a blocky black and blue tunic, all of which are delightfully 1980s, in Figure II.

If combing through a video sounds like detective work, you don’t know the half of it. In researching for this article, I compulsively took screenshots of the itsy photographs within Reyes Rodriguez’s larger ones and plugged them into Google Image Search. I couldn’t help myself! I had to do it! I wanted answers! Where the hell is the sculpture holding up a Grecian theatrical mask like Simba in The Lion King located, its vacation-ish photo connected to the man’s stylish lady friend in Figure II? Or how about the fountain holding two pots of water in the same photograph? What cursed catalog sells the ominous military baklava in Mask, pasted onto a grid alongside a leather gimp mask, a white long-nosed jester’s mask outside a house numbered 915, and a crouched, shirtless, masked man unzipping a backpack as if just caught mid-robbery? And, most importantly, where can I find a poster of the shirtless stud version of Al Gore and Bill Clinton, especially with Bill’s unzipped, cut-off jean short-shorts?

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Figure I, 2024, archival giclée print, 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm) (Credit: Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez; Courtesy of David Peter Francis, New York)

None of these desperate searches came up with definitive answers, except you can purchase postcards and magnets of ripped Gore and Clinton on eBay if you so desire. Whether from the unknown man in Mexico, vintage books and magazines, or Reyes Rodriguez himself, these are snapshots of someone else’s past, one that is essentially unknowable. That doesn’t mean I can’t give into a little theorizing here and certainly, Reyes Rodriguez encourages it by connecting these disparate images. Take, for instance, Figure I, which features a pic of a speaker at a People with AIDS Coalition rally, standing behind Silence = Death and Keith Haring posters. Reyes Rodriguez attaches this rally to a contact sheet portraying both male and female bodybuilders (Hello, Love Lies Bleeding!) and the pinup Bill and Al. On one level, these have absolutely fuck-all to do with one another. And, naturally, Reyes Rodriguez’s titles like Figure I aren’t giving any hints. But, on a deeper think, it makes some sort of sense: the ill body of a person with AIDS colliding with idealized muscular forms, alongside a presidential administration that oversaw the last years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic before the combination antiretroviral therapy made living with AIDS more possible. It’s hard to say that gym bunny culture wasn’t some sort of a reaction to the physical diminishment of illness. Other narratives in Reyes Rodriguez’s photographs are a bit more clear like the fetish-meets-danger Mask or the tranquil and tender series of three Sleeping Boys, even with the surprise art historical addition of Sleeping Hermaphroditus at the Louvre (I’d recognize that marble floor anywhere).

Reyes Rodriguez is not the only artist with a serious case of archive fever. His is much more restrained than the one seen in Ryan Patrick Krueger’s 2023 exhibition Documents from the Closet at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. In that show, Krueger created sculptural scrapbooks inlaid with a flurry of photographs, newspaper clippings, matchbooks, boxing gloves, and other assorted hoards set within towering 7-foot shipping boxes. Raised like vampiric coffins, these boxes stood on a mound of black dirt and sand. My favorite work in the show combined mostly black-and-white (read: old) images of men embracing, vamping to the camera, goofing off, many found on eBay and other sites through simple searches, alongside the envelopes within which they arrived at Krueger’s home. Collected together, these images acted as proof of likely queer friendship, love, and other kinds of kinship in ways that recorded history can come up short in addressing.

Installation view of Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s Survey at David Peter Francis, New York (Credit: Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez; Courtesy of David Peter Francis, New York)

Reyes Rodriguez enacts a similar kind of search for an alternative queer history through vernacular photographs. However, what interests me here is how his work leaves room formally for the gaps, the erasures, the absences, and the silences inherent in these imperfect, imprecise histories and how the stories told—or that we tell ourselves—can be both affirming and disappointing in equal measure. The vacant emptiness that makes up most of Reyes Rodriguez’s photographs is the black hole into which so many experiences of desire and queer lives disappear. What are we left with then, other than staring at ourselves in its abyss-like reflection?

Mostly, trying to find something meaningful in the scraps, the toss-offs, and the trash left behind, whether vague proof of care, sex, yearning, activism, or whatever. Are these histories conclusive or even satisfying? Not really, as viewers are left with more questions than answers when tracing the trajectory of Reyes Rodriguez’s metal piping. T Magazine relates to his forms as “bar graphs, invoking a sense of scientific or taxonomic connection between images that are, in fact, unrelated.” I disagree. Reyes Rodriguez’s images are linked together like homoerotic mobiles meant to hang above a queer child’s crib, recalling Danielle Ezzo’s bound imagery culled from the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as seen in her book If Not Here, Then When? Yet, Reyes Rodriguez’s structures are much more architectural than Ezzo’s delicate ones. So much so that certain pieces are almost like scaffolds as seen in Unmade Beds or Mask. In this, I see Reyes Rodriguez’s Survey in conversation with Anna Campbell’s actual physically imposing scaffolds that filled Participant Inc. during her 2022 exhibition Dress Rehearsal for a Dream Sequence. Within these scaffold structures, Campbell squirreled away various queer historical references such as a violet labrys, the silhouettes of the couple Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, otherwise known as the Ladies of Llangollen, and lines from Sondheim’s wonderfully unhinged “Rose’s Turn.” Other references were more oblique and simply erotic like a series of, what appeared to be, wooden fleshlights.

Though digging through symbolism or peering at old photographs tends to be more fun, the scaffold itself is a clue to the drive behind both Campbell and Reyes Rodriguez’s art. It’s worth considering just how odd a scaffold is as a piece of architecture, no matter how mundane, annoying, and usually hideous. A scaffold is temporary, in-between, not-quite-done yet supportive, and represents something being built or fixed. You know, kind of like the tenuous, perpetually unfinished yet ultimately rewarding process of attempting to unearth and connect with the lives buried within history itself.