For the past three years, Nunzio Madden's paintings have played host to one character and one character only. Musclebound and jaundiced, it is a plain anatomy of disquieting features: its head, bald as an egg and tiny relative to its hypermasculine, double-linebacker shoulders, hangs expressionless above a Ken-smooth crotch. Madden's recent exhibition at KINGS, titled The skylight in the ceiling beams down onto an empty slab of faux marble, pulling the steam upwards. Bodies shuffle around the marble slab, waiting for someone to step into the light and lie down, gives this figure its latest outing. The exhibition title situates Madden’s figure in a sex-on-premises bathhouse venue. Like lines of direction from some late, gay Beckett play, the title suggests an endless geometrical exchange of interchangeable somas. Yet in the show's eight figurative paintings, Madden's character goes ever alone, isolated by masses of space and dwarfed by contours of shadow.
Madden themself cuts an austere figure, though far from an unfriendly one. Their dress sense is striking with uniformities of material and colour: to our initial interview, they wear a black polo, black trousers, and a black Leatherman-branded cap that they remove frequently to run their fingers through their short-buzzed hair. Despite their plain garb, Madden’s personality is sunny, chatty. They look up and away and smile dreamily as they answer my questions, as if the significance of their work is equal parts knowledge and present imagination. Over the past decade, their practice has encompassed more media than many artists toy with in their entire careers: sculpture, textiles, papermaking, video art (both live-action and machinima). Their latest turn, towards a series of almost neoclassical figurative nudes, is only one more in a perpetual revolution.
Their studio, attached to the home they share with their partner, is a testament to their rage for material control and independence. Monumental stretchers, which they construct themselves, litter one end; flayed canvases hang above them from bulldog clips, many of them made from unusual materials like satin or velvet. They make their own gesso and oil paints and show me their process, mixing linseed oil with rust and verdigris. Around the room toys lie in stacks, with one particular toy dominating: RoboSapien, the long-discontinued 2000s children’s gadget. 'Every time I go to Savers,' Madden tells me, 'they're there for three dollars, and I can't not.' A whole company of figurines crowds a laundry basket, including a Homer Simpson model, its friendly cartoon head discordant with the yellow production-line pincers of his hands. A Stay Puft Marshmallow Man stands on a dedicated toy shelf beside a vintage Michelin Man illustration, the one image in the space that Madden didn't paint. Just like their work, Madden's studio is resplendent with representations of the male form that swell towards abstraction.
The figure at the centre of The skylight in the ceiling… made its first public appearance in Madden's contribution to Geoff Newton's exhibition Frozen Blood at Neon Parc in 2023. In a small, plain painting, the figure stands against a void in a common 'default pose' for video game models. As it turns out, the character is from a video game—one of Madden's own design. In 2022, they were solo-developing a Metroidvania game with visual-novel elements when their computer died. They lost all their work. All they were left with was the game's player model, which they made in the 3D character creator software Fuse and uploaded to Blender. Now Fuse itself is a barred way, its developer Mixamo having been purchased by Adobe, who discontinued it. The figure they're left with is an uncanny artefact, caught between corporate abandonware and a tragically lost project of their own. Madden isn't a figurative painter by training; at VCA, they laugh, it wasn't considered particularly cool. To create the paintings in The skylight in the ceiling…, they projected their character onto the canvases and drew up grids to assist in construction. The tiles of the bathhouse environment, which one of the figures climbs, evoke both the subject’s setting and Madden’s process.
Bathhouses have ever been a site of mingled utopia and dystopia for gay artists: they are both an idyll of sexual freedom and a meat market of enforced self-objectification. The figure Madden paints is one prized in the dichotomous iconography of gay desire, ancient as Athens, of 'little twinks and massive swole guys'. Body norms like these weigh heavily enough on cis men, but when you're transmasculine, like Madden, they threaten to exclude you altogether. Friends tell me that until recently, major bathhouses had a blanket policy of expelling trans men. One might not be surprised, then, that Madden's judgment has fallen on the wary side. Of the venue they once attended weekly, they have warm memories of the pool, the steam room, the light. On an interpersonal level, though, cruising culture was alienating and traumatic. 'There's no community there. You will not find allyship or friendship.'
Madden's previous work has employed self-portraiture, but in the wake of their bathhouse experiences, something called to them about this muscular character. 'There's something monstrous about that body, or very alien,' they say, remembering the Baroque paintings of similar bodies that papered their bathhouse's walls. For them, it's 'a representation of dysphoria ... It's abject.' The bodies in Madden's paintings are unhappy ones. Though their faces are either obscured or indistinct, their postures express emotional and physical torment. One title, Figure Draped on Column, might suggest a pose of sexual invitation, but the figure itself seems nearer to impalement. Another, titled Figure Falling off a Wall, depicts a body catapulted away from a white monolith like a Smash Bros character on the receiving end of a Falcon Punch.
Madden loves video games. When I bring up a possible reading of the character’s blank groin in relation to transmasculinity, Madden laughs: they don’t think it’s an illegitimate angle, just not a very pertinent one. 'It feels more digital to me. Like, they just don’t make models with penises.' The figure is very much a product of Fuse—Madden clearly wants its history as a computer object as part of the artwork. I ask if the pose the character is making in Figure Falling From Wall is a library pose. Madden says it is, then they turn the canvas sideways and point to Figure Draped on Column. It’s the same pose, thriftily repurposed.
Later, as they tell me about their love for character creation screens, they say something that startles me. 'And if I showed you every game I've played, it would be that. That is the character.'
I'm not sure I've understood. 'The character you paint?'
'Yeah,' they nod. The only difference, says Madden, is sometimes if they grow out their hair the character will also have long hair.
I bring up their earlier description of the figure as a representation of dysphoria. They fall momentarily silent, seeming themself baffled by their zigzag of identification and non-identification. 'Maybe that's not right,' they say. 'Maybe the character I paint is not me ... I need to think about that. Because maybe it's not fully true. But then also, I mean, if I could just paint my avatar from the video games, I would do that, and I don't, so maybe it's not true that it's me.' They sit with it, thinking. 'I'm not sure what the difference is.'
It is hard to imagine making Madden's figure in a video game. It’s featureless in a way most character creators verge on disallowing, not just uncustomized but countercustomized, default-beyond-default in a way no human figure could be. In one painting, Madden’s figure stands alone, looking over its shoulder, inspecting its own shadow. The viewer cannot see its face, but I read sorrow in the cast of its shoulders. Its barrel-broad upper body rouses a twinge of my painful relationship with my own frame. But what does this specimen of idealised gay manhood have to be dysphoric about? Sexual enjoyment is a paradoxical state, in which the body both expresses itself extravagantly and is somehow suspended, superseded by action and identification. In Jack the Modernist, Robert Glück limns bathhouse-going as a state of ecstatic transubstantiation, in which bodily shapeliness seems a key guarantor: he describes 'an arched waist echoed by huge Deco arcs to an infinity of longing.' But when the orgy is over, the bodies we discipline towards ecstasy threaten to become anonymous matter again. Under what conditions could this cease to haunt us? Until then, how do any of us ever leave the bathhouse?
Madden brings up that they’ve recently started strength training. They’re getting pretty strong: they can do ten pull-ups on the bar with ease. 'If my body changed,' they say, 'I couldn’t make this artwork still, because it feels like… it’d seem aspirational. Which it isn’t, for me.'
The smallest painting in The skylight in the ceiling… depicts an eye in close-up peering up from under a brow: shy, needy, an ageless rune in the desire-language of cruising. But who is desiring, here, and what do they desire? Does the hulking form of these figures suggest the symbolic ladenness of a trans body, or the brutish hegemony of a normative one? And if these bodies are normative, why do they seem so jilted, desperate? In the first of the paintings that Madden produced for the exhibition, a figure steps forth from a wall of mist in a fragile pose of self-revelation. It is a game avatar—a form designed to be inhabited—without a player, incapable of receiving one. It stands in what reads to me as a state of hungry imminence: a need of possession, sexual or existential. A hunger, alas, to no avail and without reality. It is nobody's body.
