RexWerk!

The Artist, the Work, the Gallery

by Jack Fritscher

RexWerk! The name smacks of Germanic discipline, of heroized masculinity, and of the art that imitates life—if a man goes to the right places when he cruises out to be with other men. RexWerk, the smartest new international gallery in San Francisco, is located off Folsom, on Hallam Mews, South of Market, the district of the darker side of manhood. RexWerk features the visions of the elusively mysterious, but very personal and personable artist, the reclusive Rex.

No male erotic artist today surpasses Rex’s stylized characterizations of men. Tom of Finland, a master artist himself, sees his men as sanitized blond Aryans: always young, always hung, usually in uniform. Etienne [Dom Orejudos, Kris Studios, Chicago], a formidable name for years, draws hot story board scenarios, fantasy but not reality. A. Jay (also this issue) is a magnificent cartoonist/artist of male erotica through his continuing spoof of “Harry Chess.” Each of them is a J/O turnon in his own way. Each has his following. Each has his audience.

But no artist scares guys the way Rex’s work scares guys. It’s the basic difference between simple erotic entertainment and art. With entertainment, you get exactly what you bargained for. With art, something you might not have bargained for happens; the artist confronts you; you look; you see; your way of seeing begins to change; your Super-Ego values slip another notch toward your sex-crazed Id.

Rex draws for big boys grown up enough to face their fantasies. His Rapidograph pen taps out the dots, lines, and shadings that sometimes take months for him to transform an ordinary subject into the extraordinary statement. Who hasn’t been to the baths and seen and felt, but been unable to capture in words or graphics, exactly what Rex communicates in his drawing “Bath House”?

"Bath House” was inspired by hot memories of the old St. Mark’s Baths in New York, which was a wonderland of depravity years ago before Gay Lib and wall-to-wall shag carpets took their middle-class toll of the bathhouse scene. Once upon that time, the St. Mark’s cubicles offered the dedicated voyeur more peepholes per square inch of plywood than any place since. “Bath House” is Rex’s cubicle-to-cubicle homage to its sexy, seedy glory.

Each cubicle in the drawing overflows with the touchstones of Rex’s eroticism: hairy, often clipped and shaved, muscular tattooed men, wearing the stuff of fetish trips— socks, jocks, bits of uniforms, bike gear, and leather. Cocks drip through thick foreskin. Nipples stand erect on big pecs. Rex’s men live in a roustabout world of YMCA rooms, all-nite diners, truck yards, and mattresses without designer sheets.

His men are denizens of the rebellious night.

They are men who have passed their male initiation rites and rituals.

They suck, fuck, submit, and dominate in rooms of falling plaster, naked light bulbs, dripping washbasins, a shower down the hall, the floor littered with the macho refuse of their mondo sleazo blue-collar pleasures: Bud cans, crushed Camel packs, guns, used rubber scumbags. Rex’s men celebrate their physical bodies and sensual appetites without apology to Mom and Apple Pie. His men are the beguiling trash our parents always pointed out to warn us away. His men are attractive mirrors of the very Id we homosexual men grew up to harbor in our own secret heart of hearts. His seductive men, through his mirror darkly, are us!

Some guys like a “favorite” Rex drawing while taking exception in a quieter tone to another Rex work they “can’t stand because it’s, well, too HEAVY!” Other guys say the same thing, but reverse the order. (Heavy, like beauty, is in the eye-and-stroke of the beholder.) No one is supposed to like all the work of any artist. Different drawings, especially in the commercial art world, are commissioned by different patrons wanting different erotic statements.

"Twenty-One Tongues," for example, is a rare commission for one of Rex’s close buddies. Even the title is a personal joke between them. (There are only, by actual count, seventeen tongues.) Nevertheless, this private commission has a universal appeal as the communicants in the military-latrine setting gang around the communion rail of the urinal/trough like worshippers at a temple. The pissing is a perversatile ritual baptism wherein the High-Priest DI at the top of the trough pisses down to initiate the new recruits whose tongues lap up the piss as if they are at the Fount of Saving Grace. This is the irony of Rex that makes his hyper-masculine style so gut-wrenching: he is basically a ritual, religious artist sanctifying the profane and the depraved. Rex glories in flesh.