Gio Black Peter, born Giovanni Paolo Andrade Guevara in Guatemala, moved to the United States with his family at the age of five. Now based in New York City, he works across painting, drawing, performance, music, video and film, and has become a distinctive figure in the city’s underground art scene. His practice combines an exuberant visual imagination with a provocative exploration of sexuality, identity, violence and social conformity.

Black Peter’s paintings are characterised by bold outlines, distorted figures, expressive faces and a vivid, often deliberately discordant palette. His human forms occupy loosely defined spaces in which the familiar and the fantastic intermingle. Drawing on a range of artistic influences, including David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diego Rivera, he combines an immediate, almost childlike spontaneity with a more confrontational engagement with contemporary society. His subjects range from intimate portraits and encounters to explicitly sexual scenes, often challenging conventional distinctions between beauty and ugliness, tenderness and aggression, the sacred and the profane.

Sexuality is central to much of his work, but Black Peter resists the assumption that it is an end in itself. As he explained in an interview with Out magazine, ‘If you look at my work, past the fact that the characters are mostly naked, you’ll see that I also address violence, alienation, oppression, redemption, defiance, and love.’ His imagery gives expression to lives and desires frequently marginalised by mainstream culture, while its uninhibited treatment of the body challenges the censorship and moral conventions that continue to shape public representations of sexuality.

Black Peter’s multidisciplinary approach has brought him into collaboration with the multimedia artists Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny, collectively known as SUPERM, as well as the filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyères, France, and at galleries in New York, Europe and elsewhere. He has also appeared in James Bolton’s Eban and Charley (2000) and LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008).

For Black Peter, artistic expression is not simply a professional pursuit but a means of negotiating existence. ‘I don’t know how not to be an artist,’ he explains. ‘It’s how I cope with life.’

Gio Black Peter’s website can be found here, and his Facebook page here.

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Mike Kuchar – American underground gay illustrator of homoerotic subjects.
Darwin Leon – Cuban-born Miami painter of distorted, sexually explicit figures.
Stu Mead – American underground painter of transgressive sexual subject matter.
Hugh Steers – American painter of gay life in the AIDS era.