JD Raenbeau: At Home With You
Clamp Gallery
May 9 – July 3, 2025
One doesn’t have to look far these days to find queer art in galleries. Some spaces have made it central to their mission. P.P.O.W., Auxier Klein, and others have gone out of their way to include queer artists in their rosters, correcting for the art world’s long-standing dominance of straight white men. Still, when will we reach a moment when queer art doesn’t feel inherently political? Lately, it seems we’re further from that moment than ever.
At Home With You, JD Raenbeau’s (the artist’s pseudonym) solo debut at CLAMP, deserves to be seen for what it is: a tender, luminous exploration of love, sex, and domestic bliss. And yet, our political climate persists, forcing us to view this work through the lens of oppression and resistance. The show is on view through July 3.
“Winter is over, all the plants are coming up. There’s a moment in which it appears nature has an erection. When everything is set up and champagne is poured all over the bushes.”
— David Hockney, 2019, on his love of Van Gogh
Hockney’s quote echoed in my mind as I wandered through Raenbeau’s paintings and drawings. The show is a celebration of spring and summer, of nature reawakening, and queer sexuality, in all its curiosity, joy, and vulnerability.
The subjects are Raenbeau and his husband, Logan, in their lush Long Island garden. Logan, a landscape and habitat designer, has shaped the property into an Edenic stage where the couple appears unburdened by the constraints of cis-heteronormative society. In Raenbeau’s world, they have permission to admire each other, to prune and bask, to lie languid and at peace in the glory of what they’ve made together.
Most of the works are small to easel-sized oils on panel, working from photos while keeping a plein air approach to process. Raenbeau’s painting is rooted in realism, but it’s not purely representational. He marries the jeweled sensuality of Marilyn Minter with a dash of Renoir’s softness to create surfaces that glow with desire. His technique makes way for blurred edges resolving into finely feathered flesh, inviting the viewer into moments of intimate attention where skin catches dappled light in high grass, bodies half-hidden in verdant bloom.
His palette, too, pushes realism toward emotional expression. Naturalistic landscapes are infused with fluorescent tones that are not quite surreal, but emotionally charged. These scenes pulse with energy. The mood hovers between pre- and post-coital, sometimes midstream, embracing the liminal space of anticipation and deep, wordless connection.
Raenbeau is in conversation with contemporary queer painters like J. Carino (also working under a pseudonym) and TM Davy, but his clearest north star is the artist trio PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared and Margaret French). In With You, he pays direct homage to Margaret French with a tender gesture of artistic kinship by superimposing a well-known photo of her onto Logan’s back, as if tattooed. Rendered in violet-pink sepia tones, the image evokes time’s passage, the permanence of legacy, and the great impact that people can have on our lives when they are brave enough to lead by example. Her mirrored posture seems to pass the baton to a younger generation continuing queer life as an act of resistance and celebration.
In Logan After Cadmus, Raenbeau reenacts a well-known Cadmus portrait of Jared French, Jerry painted in 1931. Now the setting is their garden, and the book is swapped from James Joyce’s Ulysses for E.O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life. It’s clear why Raenbeau chose this moment: it is unflinchingly intimate and emotionally exposed, which may well be the show’s thesis.
If there’s a political message here, it’s subtle but resonant: to exist openly as a queer person today is still to ask why the world can’t simply let you be. That tension feels like the generative force behind Raenbeau’s vision: a place where he and his husband are free to become satyrs and nymphs in a Fragonard-like garden of their own making.
