The Passion Series
” I want my work to speak in terms of our experience of the world and the life we live in it.”
A gay Jesus in our days.
The figure of this modern queer Christ is booed by conservatives, tortured by the military, and on the third day rises from the dead to enjoy homoerotic moments with an angel.
This contemporary Jesus arrives as a young gay man in a modern big city in “The Passion Series” by Douglas Blanchard. The paintings present a new and liberating vision of the last days of Jesus, including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper and the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection.
“Christ is one of us in my paintings,” says Blanchard. “In his sufferings, I want to show him as someone who fully experiences and understands what it is to be an unwelcome outsider.” Blanchard, an art professor and self-proclaimed “very agnostic believer,” used the series to deal with his own struggles of faith as a New Yorker who witnessed the terrorist attacks of September 11th.