Who in the end really wants to be summed up, boiled down and categorised? And if that's true of our asinine, but still precious selves, then why would we want to do just that with an artwork in a text? Especially considering that art remains one of the only places - and a highly contested one at that - where ideas might conflate without congesting, seduce without necessarily disappointing, straddle and taunt the realms of the explainable and the desirable.

Richard Hawkins's work over the last decade or so resists and flouts plenty of easy, well-worn categories and definitions. Sure, at times, and for his own reasons he has flirted blatantly with some. Take for example his torn or cut sexy hot-guy queer collages and his reworked, appropriated photographs from the 1990s - some featuring 1980s' teen-idol Matt Dillon, such as No title (02)

(1993-98), a magic-marker drawing on a photograph. But tomorrow is another day, it has its own inexorable logic and might, for instance, be much more conducive to making some high-brow studio work (concentrated, rarefied, isolated) in the form of soft painterly abstraction. (Can a hardcore fag be a closeted hardcore late modernist? Is it just me and my imaginary friend Andy, or why does this question, banal as it is, have such resonance despite our Jaspers and Roberts?) Too many fractured, mirror-like (in the sense that abstraction throws you back on yourself) compositions of geometric ambience and decorative, wallflower-like silence lead back to a longing for the flesh and figures, the exploration of their holes, warts and cracks. Forms and subjects, new arenas of interest, suggest dynamic opposites, dramatic new scenes, departures and returns. Every hard-won artistic resolution - a good work, a well-balanced show - is perhaps another voice in an internal argument. You have an option as an artist to tend a fruit tree tied to a trellis or to sow wild oats. There is no right or wrong, but the later certainly will allow for some eventfulness, the wealth, an alternative currency of reconsiderations and exceptions.

In his work, Hawkins has pursued a bright array of far-flung artistic and cultural territories and topics. At first, he picked-up and collaged visual and physical detritus from celebrity and consumer culture, for example his series of second-hand books signed by celebrities, such as Signed Books: Fag-Hags (c.1990), which includes a paperback edition of Tammy Wynette: Stand by Your Man, signed and inscribed 'To Richard/with love/Sandra Bernhard'. Later he painted enticing rhombi abstractions, followed by cartoon-like American Indian paintings and humouresque, if a little sleazy, painted snapshots of boy-loving milieus. More recently he has produced faux-archaeological museum displays: unorthodox art-historical accounts of Roman sculpture vis-à-vis ideas about 'gender diversity'. In some ways it is possible to see the different groups and series of works, such as found material collages, abstract and figurative paintings and sculptures (and the various combinations of each), as discrete areas of inquiry - and not as a linear progression. If we need geometric figures to help understand how Hawkins's artistic thinking wanders, backtracks and re-tracks we could take a queue from paintings such as mostly pink (2000), in which nothing is totally straight, or others in which circles or tree stumps abound.

Hawkins's work is an engrossing combination of fastidiousness and caprice, avidness and droll negation. Seen as a disparate whole, its wilfulness has assumed surprising, radical proportions. That is, if one's taste is orthodox or demanding of the kind of puritanical neatness that somewhere along the line was imposed on art in order that it could be recognised as art, or on ideas in art in order that they be received as serious art ideas. While tradition has it that one reason for valuing artists is that they are the people who are meant, unlike us, to do exactly what they damn well want to, few actually can. Hawkins's work grabs me not just because it is charged with same-sex desire and sexual politics, or because of its aesthetic sophistication: there is a difference in how he might place a cut-out piece of paper on a field or hang something, just so. Take for example Every Mother's Nightmare (1991), a dangling wall-hanging with homoerotic clippings tucked into its folds. In Hawkins's hands colour and compositional technique are discursive tools and ends in their own right, modernism is a well-thumbed, grubby back-catalogue that can be drawn on, and postmodernist thinking a toolbox.

What I like and keep tossing and turning about is how his oeuvre pops out and pushes the frame of what is normally expected by that encompassing, delimitating word. To borrow a metaphor from Michel Tournier's novel Gemini (Les météores, 1975), Hawkins's method is like a kind of cultural image- and discourse-hungry tapeworm. The context or settings of his work have included Hollywood, Texas, Ancient Rome, Bali, Thailand and Japan. His works suggest everywhere the motivation for this nomad restlessness: the imperative of wayward desire. In Gemini Alexandre Surin, an old-school homosexual and dandy head of a family rubbish-disposal business, rants:

Desire has simplified me, scraped me to the bone, reduced me to a core. How am I to hang the rags of civil status onto this elementary tropism? In these frantic moments I understand the fear that sex inspires in society. It baffles and negates its entire substance. So it puts a muzzle on it - heterosexuality - and locks in a cage - marriage. But now and then the beast emerges from its cage, and even manages to tear off its muzzle. Immediately they all back away shrieking and calling for the police.¹

In Hawkins's work 'desire-driven acts [are] not only a contrast to but an alternative to societal norms and patriarchal legal/legacies'.² In whatever mode or style he happens to be focusing on at the time, sexy young males tend to pop into the picture as subjects, muses, teasers, lovers or idols. Whether plucked or excised from mainstream sources or art-history books, there seems to be an infinite supply and variety of suitable types. Among them - and this is by no means an exhaustive list - famous actors, models, porn stars, artists, ancient philosophers, statuesque marble or bronze hunks, carbuncular gents, rent boys and a fake, Frankenstein-ed together perfect lover. To date, Hawkins's individual exhibitions don't look unduly overburdened by this critical massing and cross-referencing of ideas, material and style. To be more accurate, the true object of his desire might not just be a cute guy, alive or dead, but equally a colour such as purple ('I started painting purple monochromes because I couldn't think of any purple monochromes. White ones, yellow ones, red ones, yes, but no purple'), or even a particular kind of marker pen.³ His last few exhibitions were neatly self-contained, austere almost, displayed like well-placed and succinctly completed sentences on self-imposed topics or areas of interest. As critic Bruce Hainley has suggested, Hawkins's work is also about a certain approach to research. This aspect is clear from the artist's own intriguing essays or long 'notes', as he calls them, which sometimes accompany his exhibitions. In these writings Hawkins likes to remind the reading viewer, in brackets, that his findings and statements are 'proposals', and that 'the research' and works are 'not yet complete'.⁴ His version of artistic research is that of an affected or dandy collector, a hoarder of images and anecdotes and a devoted fan. Its 'rules' and conventions allow for free adaptations, courtings of promising distractions, the inclusion of unauthoritative sources, celebrating gaps or half-truths, uncovering odd bedfellows, clashing and duelling referents, a kind of academia-drag, and subjective and epochal grand jetées.⁵

Hawkins's dovetail (not twin) consecutive solo 'pagan city' exhibitions in the second half of 2006 - 'Urbis Paganus Part I + III' at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne and an untitled show at Corvi-Mora, London - both drew partly on archaeological digs; these digs did not take place in real dirt, but in art-history books full of reproductions. In his notes on the first of these exhibitions, Hawkins explains that, conceptually, the five-part ongoing project 'took as a model the construction of gender through familial and substitutional acculturation. I thought I needed a title like "Urbis Paganus" to lend the allusion of a subject's generative and reactive journey through a cityscape of seductions and determining influences. In short it's a kind of Bildungsroman where the final chapter, "The Cabinet of the Hermaphrodite", is meant to offer an expansive opt-out of the determinism expressed in the preceding sections.'⁶ The preceding sections in 'Urbis Paganus' are 'Pater Paedegogyrastica', 'Magna Mater', 'The Masculine Son' and 'The Effeminate Son'.

The first of these manifested itself, in part, in the rear courtyard of the Cologne gallery on the damp steps leading to a cellar. There was a ceramic plaque that read 'Lapis Niger', an invocation of 'the black stone' sitting off-kilter in the paving stones in the Forum, a place of ill omen, and a buried father's curse on his potentially incestuous sons. Upstairs under the lights were vitrines that presented effigies of the exemplary but slightly unlikely 'masculine son', Antinous. The favoured son of Emperor Hadrian, Antinous mysteriously drowned in the Nile and was elevated to the status of a demigod. Statutes of Antinous were subsequently duly erected all over the empire. Hawkins's take on classicism possibly should be understood in light of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976). Certainly he is appealing to pre-Christian, pre-Modern sexuality. This probability is further reinforced by Hawkins's interest in hermaphrodites.⁷ In the London exhibition hermaphroditic ceramic figurines in Untitled (2006) were displayed on a table and occupied centre stage. These joyful frolicking, roughly thumbed beings were glazed mostly in ivory or white - although there is also a deep blue one. Most of them have rounded large hips and thighs, perky breasts and male genitalia. One has more than a dozen breasts in budding rows. Hawkins apparently intended that they 'recall Tang-period funereal ceramics or Roman-era votive statutory', and should 'have a complicated, anomalous relationship between an indicated front and an anomalous back'.⁸ Like in the case of Rebecca Warren, Fischli and Weiss or Isa Genzken, Hawkins's turn to clay has plenty of self-irony and humour about it. The figures are rough and ready. When I first saw them in their erectness, their poses seemed somewhat in contrast to other hermaphrodite sculptures, such as the Louvre's Hermaphrodite Endormi (Roman copy of a Greek statute c.2nd BC, C2nd AD Imperial Roman) originally from the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and dug up in 1608, or the one that can be found at the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

Intuitively on the right track (Hawkins's work often invites you to accompany the artist along such enquiries and roving musings), I later read what Hawkins wrote about the relation of his figurines to those sleeping beauties:

Throughout, at least, the Victorian and modern eras, historical sculpture with more graphic or erotic content has been displayed discretely - if at all - and the Borghese installation is characteristic in this; her more feminine and gendernormative qualities are emphasised by facing the rest of her toward the wall. The Louvre sculpture, however, is displayed according to more contemporary conventions - in the round - but also in such a way that one is directed toward viewing the figure's back first and then invited to view the front afterwards. What I've found interesting through this installation is that the sleeping hermaphrodite is perhaps the only Classical work whose back is its front and its front its back - an intriguing, almost allegorical relationship to both gender ambiguity and three-dimensionality, especially within the primarily frontal dictates of other sculpture of the period.⁹

In the same exhibition, the abstract compositions of irregular squares on fields in autumn tones, and the collages with classical sculpture overlaid with more irregular black squares - Union of Eroticized Gender with Abstract Overlay/Surplus and Collage Feminine with Abstract Overlay/Surplus (both 2006) - surrounded the sculptures. The blend of abstraction and historical content seemingly is pulled-off with great ease, even though it involves a kind of rupture. In Hawkins's paintings, both as a problematic greater whole and within his various series in which questions of composition, image and paint might be handled entirely differently, there is a similar blending of oppositions. One reason for this is, as one commentator noted, is that in his paintings 'gender ambiguity is folded into painterly ambiguity'.¹⁰ Sometimes this is apparent in the works themselves, particularly in his series shown at Richard Telles Fine Art in 2004 which included Options, not solutions (2004), a painting that depicts a ghastly wrinkled fellow cropped in the foreground peering a curvy effeminate youth in a bright chequered, possibly South-East Asian setting. This painting is one of a group whose cast 'includes variously undressed men seeing and being seen. From hard bodies to skinny lads to flabby, effeminate, girly-men to decrepit lechers, they hang out, strike poses, show off their tan lines, strut on stage as numbered contestants and kill time in clubs drenched in blue, pink and green.'¹¹

Perhaps at first more tangential or inexplicable are his American Indian paintings. These works are a collection of landscapes with tree stumps, yellowing fencing intersecting red earth and long-nosed figures. Hawkins's 'Notes For Paintings' help make connections. For example, Indians figure as a subject not just because of family history or an interest in assimilation and minority politics, but also because of the 'polysexual, polytheistic and hyper-assimilative and adaptive nature of Southeast Indian cultures.'¹² Not long before making these microcosmic history paintings Hawkins also 'identified the figure … as a "stage-hog" that took attention away form the formal aspects of his work'.¹³ Terry R. Myers wrote something that 'explains to some degree his abrupt move into "pure" abstraction in a series of smallish and toughly quaint nonrepresentational canvases'.¹⁴ He was referring to paintings such as red & blue plus (2000). For Hawkins, abstraction can never be pure. For example, in his solo exhibition at Corvi-Mora in 2000, the suite of abstract canvases were accompanied by dabbed-on reproductions from magazines of 'beautiful boys (heavy jaws, big mouths, deep set eyes, pale skin and thick dark hair)'.¹⁵ These compositions are completed by splotch marks that look like he used the images to clean his brushes on, 'suggesting that he couldn't have made the paintings, despite their abstraction, without these muses'.¹⁶

In an interview published in 2003 in Art - A Sex Book, Hawkins expanded frankly on his own irreverent approach to painting abstractly:

I was telling a friend today, in a discussion about masturbation habits, that my daily routine consists of painting in the morning for a few hours and then going back to bed for a long, leisurely stroll through some Brazilian she-male porn. I'm not sure that the former informs the latter, but the latter certainly does inform the former - in the sense that abstract paintings, at least the way I make them, tend to be neither either, nor or, but both.¹⁷

In his studio, the boundaries between abstract and figurative works in the outside world don't apply:

At times, I drag out older paintings which have seemed beyond repair (at least in the non-representational vein) and work a kind of clumsy figuration into them. Using figuration in this way - as a kind of not-non-representation - seems to provide the pleasure of literalising the crudeness, preposterousness, half-ugliness and curmudgeonry that I'm always trying to force into abstract works.¹⁸

In Hawkins's work diversity is not weakness or lack of formal resolve; rather, it provides a multiplicity that gives rise to an engaging set of possible readings, generating all manner of blends, crossbreds, hybrids or chimeras, the revelatory impure, and often the monstrously beautiful.¹⁹

— Dominic Eichler