Brick boys leads us through London’s streets, where unexpected encounters play out on grey pavements and in shadowy corners. Six paintings are on show here: two large canvases (Pavement saints and City fucks back); one panel (still burning); and three smaller works (Burn me into the skyline, Body, and Private rituals). Nearly all of them feature young men on the move, rendered in a consistent palette of dark blues, blacks, and sodium green. Viewed together, they appear to trace a passage through the city over the course of one night, each scene suspended like a frame from a nocturnal thriller.

Installation Views (6 images)

In his recent shows at diez and Brunette Coleman, Laurie Smith has spotlighted nightlife scenes and friends from his East London queer community in spectral portraits reminiscent of twentieth-century queer painter Patrick Angus, one of his key inspirations. It was the view from Smith’s studio in Haggerston – those warm brick façades so familiar to us Londoners – that sparked his new interest in the dramatic potential of architecture. London’s surfaces – falling down, furred with moss and steeped in grime – prove an ideal subject for the slow, textural brushwork that has become Smith’s signature.

Another flashpoint was a recent major retrospective of the ChineseAmerican artist Martin Wong, renowned for his tender depictions of queer love amid the graffitied brickwork and empty storefronts of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. Yet Smith’s urban cityscapes are far from the romanticised decay that Wong sought to monumentalise. In Body, a single, empty house recalls the haunted quiet of Edward Hopper and Giorgio de Chirico. And when figures do feature in Smith’s canvases – as in Private rituals – they are swathed in the shadows of tall, forbidding buildings. (Burn me into the skyline, in which a lone figure towers above the rooftops, is a rare exception.)

Selected Works (6 images)

Like classic noir cinematography, Smith uses the city’s architecture to choreograph tension: light spills ominously from an open doorway, figures prowl down half-empty streets, their gaze rooted to the pavement. The silhouetted woman lighting her cigarette in the window in City fucks back is lifted directly from one of twentieth-century American cinema’s defining noirs, Taxi Driver (1976), its composition a study in voyeurism and self-surveillance. And what are we supposed to make of the young man lingering on the street beneath her? Wherever you look, danger feels close at hand.

Smith’s preference for chiaroscuro – stark contrasts of illumination and shadow – deepens this noir mood, cloaking the gaze of his figures and obscuring their motives. In still burning, a young man follows another through the half-light, two steps behind, unseen; whether this is an erotic game of pursuit or the prelude to an assault remains unclear. The elongated shadow, dark colour palette, and downturned face sustain this ambiguity, suspending the moment between desire and dread.

In Pavement saints, the largest painting in this exhibition, Smith offers a queering of The Street (1933), an eerie, dreamlike Parisian streetscape by Balthus. His street is resolutely London – those familiar white sashes and porticoed doorways again but, like the French master, he uses it as a psychological stage, a constructed space for tension, stillness, and voyeurism. Whereas Balthus’ figures are deliberately constrained, absorbed in their own self-contained worlds, Smith’s appear subtly aware of one another, trailing glances and half-noticed gestures. The brash red of the child’s dress announces the scene’s implicit sexuality – but what has caught their eye, just out of our sight? The painting’s crossfire of glances, its teasing ambiguity of looking and being looked at, conjures as much the thrill as the menace of spontaneous encounters.

Smith’s streets are home to the sexually adventurous and socially marginalised, those who have held out against the homogenising force of gentrification, its impulse to police what happens there and who is permitted to walk, linger, or desire. The smirking, baseball-capped onlookers in Pavement saints are collaged from found imagery and documentary footage of queer and trans youth in 1980s downtown New York, an area since redeveloped beyond recognition. Another of Smith’s touchstones is the writing of artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, whose Waterfront Journals (1996) records his experience cruising at the derelict Chelsea Piers, where every blown-out doorway and passing face seemed to promise both danger and the possibility of sexual contact. The Piers, like so much of the world that Wojnarowicz charted, have all but vanished.

Of course, it would be naïve of us to romanticise New York City in the 1980s – an era defined by the AIDS crisis, mass death, and Reaganite conservatism – but as the critic and theorist Samuel R. Delaney observes in his seminal text Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), the sanitisation of public life in recent decades has foreclosed many of the connections that once energised our cities and gave them life. In London too, gentrification has transformed our streets, replacing their unruly energy with a bland, middle-class, heteronormative respectability. As I write this, the future of the Hampstead Heath ponds – spaces once promising the kind of cross-class, cross-ethnic, intergenerational queer connections Delaney celebrates – seems to hang in the balance, imperilled by a group of TERFs intent on the exclusion of our trans siblings.

I long for the untold promise of Smith’s streets, their melancholic memorial to a wild, untamed city still capable of surprise. His figures move through the streets with an effortless erotic charge – en route, perhaps, to a club, a warehouse rave, or the promise of a stranger’s bed. Follow me, they seem to say – who knows where we’ll end up.

— Text by Alastair Curtis