Ralph Pugay's Collaged Queer Paradise

"Ralph Pugay puts things where they don't belong. His paintings revolve around witty, cartoonish juxtapositions: vampires at the gym, a "meditation contest" with corporate sponsorship. They collapse time and geography, lines between fact and fiction and holy artifacts and internet garbage. In Sarcophagus Workshop, from 2023, ancient Egyptians decorate coffins as if attending a hobby class. But these are slippery jokes."

"Despite the grim setup, "It's kind of, like, lovely," Boas told me. The joy is that you can't really say why. "It's making these conjunctions that don't-they refuse to meet up," Boas said. "They won't make sense, and they're fine with that." Instead, they work like queer allegories, animated by repurposed biblical tropes, viral TikToks, and allusions to video games."

Ralph Pugay stages witty, cartoonish juxtapositions—vampires at the gym, a corporate-sponsored "meditation contest," and ancient Egyptians decorating coffins like hobby-class attendees. His images collapse time and geography and blur boundaries between fact and fiction, holy artifacts and internet detritus. The works operate as queer allegories animated by repurposed biblical tropes, viral TikToks, and video-game allusions. The initial humor often gives way to lingering, difficult questions that resist simple interpretation. Paintings abstract personal instances beyond autobiography while retaining an emotional core that reflects background architecture and lived influences.

Read at Portland Monthly