ABSTRACT
This chapter examines paintings depicting allegorical journeys by Gio Black Peter (Giovanni Paolo Andrade Guevara). Born in Guatemala in 1979, Peter was brought to the United States by his parents as a child, but has stayed on to live and to work in New York City, achieving particular prominence due to his paintings on subway maps and his extension of techniques and forms that extend, in part, those of Paul Gaugin and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Peter’s map and travel paintings are a particularly exciting representative of ecstatic ordinarinesses as maps shaped by queer men often present complex instances of queer erotics dominating, and yet at a remove from, outlines of US cities set in the background. Such works emphasize queer lives that are often submerged into or hidden by schematics of mainstream conventions and expectations. This combination or bricolage of queer eroticism and Americanism provides a multidimensional visual rhetoric that signals the ways in which queer lives travel apart from and yet often parallel to more mainstream American lives, while on some level consistently intersecting and challenging the latter.
