ALEXANDRE
PEPIN
(FALL 2026)
(STUDIO No.18)
Pepin's paintings navigate themes of queer pleasure, longing, intimacy, and transience through recurring subjects: lovers in bed, birds, flowers, fruits, butterflies, and elementary geometric forms.
DESIGN TEAM.
STANLEY SOUTH, SOL MA, TINA LI
PHOTOGRAPHER.
NIKHOL WARDS
CREDITS.
He builds through layering, sanding, and glazing. Soft pastel lines form grids and planes that segment the image quietly, and gestures repeat and wander into symbolic structures. Some pigments are made from earth he has foraged and ground by hand, with their varying granularity legible as brittle, molecular, or cemented, bringing a sensibility to geological time into the color.
ABOUT.
The paintings draw from a lineage of queer modernist painters — Hartley, Bess, Tsarouchis, Jarman, Martin, Graves — to find contemporary form for queer intimacy, and insist on contemplative attention through their brittle materiality, with tenderness and fallibility sharing the surface in tension, alongside desire and dissolution. Figures, often absorbed by texture or braided into the larger pattern of the composition, insist on joy and tenderness as forms of resilience.
