Art, AIDS and Queer Love: Scores for the Absent in the Work of Aviva Rahmani, Nan Goldin and Felix Gonzalez-Torres

How art, memory and the AIDS crisis keep the loves of Jon Phetteplace, Gilles Dusein, Gotscho and Ross Laycock alive inside us

Some images do more than show loss. They create a room you can enter. If you stay with them, you feel a person return.

Three constellations of works do this with particular force:

• Aviva Rahmani’s watercolour series The Cellist, for her friend and collaborator Jon Phetteplace.
• Nan Goldin’s photographs of Gilles Dusein and Gotscho during Gilles’s final months.
• Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s works for Ross Laycock, especially Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).

All three move through the same historical weather. The AIDS crisis erased communities. It also pushed queer love into public view mostly at the moment of catastrophe.

Yet these works do not speak about AIDS in the abstract. They speak about specific people. They speak about relationships that refuse to vanish.

Aviva Rahmani: listening to Jon

In her Substack post Memory and Continuity: The poignancy of grief and rescue, Aviva Rahmani writes about Jon Phetteplace with careful clarity. She does not perform grief. She names it, then she works with it.

Jon composed and performed new music. He moved between experimental scenes in Europe and the United States. Over time, he turned toward classical repertoire. Then AIDS entered his life and narrowed his horizon. After the illness, he took his own life.

Rescue through an archive

Years later, Rahmani watched a form of rescue take shape. UCSD agreed to take Jon’s papers. They received 13.8 linear feet of scores, tapes, photographs, notebooks, and correspondence. A life returned as boxes, labels, and shelf marks. Bureaucracy did not erase love here. It carried it.

Rahmani also built a second archive, quieter and more intimate. She did it with image-making. She did it through The Cellist.

The everyday before the storm

In these watercolours and drawings, Rahmani does not chase drama. She stays with time, posture, and attention. She shows what you see when you sit near a friend for years.

In one sheet, Jon sits on a folding chair with crossed legs. A red shirt cuts through blues and greens. Dark mountains anchor the horizon. The cello rests against him with total familiarity. His gaze holds focus. He does not perform for us. He works.

Another image moves in the opposite direction. Jon nearly disappears. Pale washes of pink, ochre, and turquoise barely suggest shoulders, hands, and the cello’s curve. The figure floats in white space. The memory resists fading, but it trembles.

A pencil drawing reduces everything to line. Rahmani draws the face, the bow hand, and the instrument’s ribs. She refuses decoration. She keeps only the fragile fact of a man playing.

When color becomes heat

Then the red ink wash changes the temperature. Vermilion floods the page. From that field, the cellist emerges in urgent gestures. Dark strokes carve arm, bow, and instrument. The image feels like a scan of emotion. It asks what remains when everything else burns away.

Together, the series moves from clarity to dissolution, and then returns. It behaves like a musical phrase. It plays, it echoes, it comes back as memory.

What the viewer knows, and the paintings do not

Rahmani made these works while Jon lived. The catastrophe belongs to our knowledge, not hers. We bring the future into the paper when we look. That knowledge sits over the images like a thin layer of pigment.

Still, the paintings insist on one thing. Jon does not collapse into the illness that arrives later. He remains a working musician. He remains a complicated friend. He keeps habits and moods. The epidemic stays in the background. The person stays in the foreground.

Nan Goldin: the last kiss

Rahmani holds the before. Nan Goldin looks at the end.

In The Kiss That Gripped My Heart, Gotscho kisses Gilles Dusein. Gilles lies on a narrow bed. His head tilts, his eyes are closing. The pillow still shows the weight of a body. Goldin hides nothing. She also avoids spectacle. She records a moment that love earned.

Other photographs from the same sequence show the couple during the last year of life of Gilles. They lie together. Their bodies fold into each other with ordinary tenderness. That tenderness becomes almost unbearable once you know what comes next.

Goldin’s ethics of staying

Goldin’s color carries the room. It holds bruised blues, greyed yellows, and the green cast of hospital light. She does not soften the scene. She also does not exploit it. Her camera takes the side of the people who stayed.

The kiss becomes the real subject. It refuses stigma. It refuses fear. It says the body is not a hazard to love. It says love remains possible at the edge of death.

In years when institutions erased queer relationships, that kiss also becomes testimony. It states a fact: we were here, and we loved like this.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: after the body

If Rahmani paints time before loss, and Goldin stands at the bedside, Felix Gonzalez-Torres works after the body disappears. He builds forms that let grief continue without closing.

In Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), he places a pile of wrapped candies in a gallery corner. The initial weight is 175 pounds, Ross Laycock’s healthy weight. Visitors take a piece. The pile shrinks over time. It mirrors Ross’s physical decline. Staff later replenish the pile. The work returns to weight.

Participation as mourning

In photographs, the candy can look bright, even cheerful. The story changes the surface. When you unwrap a sweet, you enter a slow disappearance. You participate in it with your hands.

Gonzalez-Torres repeats this logic in other works. Untitled (Perfect Lovers) pairs two synchronized clocks. Sooner or later, one falls out of sync. He also prints the image of an unmade bed. The sheets keep the imprint of two bodies. The bodies do not return.

Sadly, in the end, Felix too succumbed to AIDS. Yet before that, through his work, he had already found a way to distribute grief instead of sealing it inside the couple; he lets strangers carry it for a moment. In the context of AIDS, that choice matters: society often pushed queer mourning into private corners, and he responds with art that can exist only through public presence.

Three emotional climates of the AIDS years

When you place these artists side by side, you hear three emotional climates.

Before

Rahmani gives everyday life before the storm. She gives rehearsal, concentration, and landscape. She paints a person fully alive, before medical language tries to swallow him.

During

Goldin stands inside the storm. She refuses denial. She shows what it means to stay beside a body that changes and shuts down, while the culture turns away.

After

Gonzalez-Torres works in the aftermath. He gives empty beds, missing weight, and clocks that keep going. He shows what happens when you remain, and your loved one does not.

This history also includes social failure. Governments failed. Healthcare systems failed. Churches failed. Families failed. Stigma traveled fast. Indifference traveled faster. Many people died without proper care, without public recognition of relationships, and without archives.

Memory as bridge: from tragedy to feeling

Here, memory does not stay a private wound. It becomes a bridge.

The Cellist lets us meet Jon beyond the category of “victim.” Goldin lets us feel the risky tenderness of a final kiss, not a sanitized label. Gonzalez-Torres lets sweetness exist where bitterness could dominate.

Visual AIDS: an institutional form of care

Visual AIDS in New York also plays a crucial role. Since the late 1980s, it has built and cared for an archive of artists living with HIV and of those lost to AIDS. It organizes exhibitions, commissions, and the annual Day Without Art. It insists that the epidemic is not only medical and political. It is also a field of creativity, community, and feeling.

In a sense, Visual AIDS performs on an institutional level what these artists do in their work. It refuses a story that ends at diagnosis.

Memory here does not become a museum of horror. It becomes a way back to complexity. It brings back humor, stubbornness, habits, and gestures. It returns the exact shape of a kiss.

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