On Living in the Swerve

Dr El Reid-Buckley on Peter Bradley and Stephen Doyle’s Dysphoric Euphoria at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, June 2025.

Throughout his writings, Leo Bersani mediated on ‘the swerve’: the ways in which desire, subjectivity and identity are disrupted, dismantled and, in some cases, radically disintegrated within a queer body. Yet despite his negative lean, he finds potential in the immediate, whereby we can redefine our relations to ourselves and one another; a kind of future against an idea of ‘pure’ progress. There is an inherent rupture in Bersani’s theoretical writing that demands a break in the binaried options of queer pessimism or utopian futurity. In a similar vein, Peter Bradley and Stephen Doyle’s Dysphoric Euphoria leans into the swerve; through figurative and still life painting that trace queer time against the normative modes of being.

Bradley and Doyle’s show mediates on contemporary queerness in Ireland, yet the artists take two different perspectives. On the one hand, Bradley’s work is playful and often camp, highlighting experiences of queer joy and learning to become oneself, or perhaps rather, learning that one can be many selves. On the other hand, Doyle’s paintings are darker, exemplifying the constant, rising threats that queer and trans people are faced with daily, that seem to bubble through all realities and realms. While initially, there seems to be clean and clearly defined differences between the two artists’ bodies of works in this show, upon closer inspection we can encounter the one million invisible ghosts that join the works together. Instead, the artists collaboratively shift between pain and beauty, but never settle on either. To separate those feelings that Bradley and Doyle visualise–euphoria and dysphoria, respectively–and make them into binary opposites is in of itself impossible in a queer logic that always defies dimorphism. Rather, both artists wrangle with the in-betweenness of it all, how queerness can transform and remold itself quicker than it is made.

Bradley’s works push against the ‘straightening’ powers of heteronormativity that attempt to make queer bodies and lives fit into the narrow constraints of what it means to be ‘normal’. Instead, these paintings lean heavily into the euphoric capacities of queerness, where memory, time and bodies move in fluid motions. In the “Pink Triangle” triptych, there is a vivid ecstasy that uniquely captures queer joy on the site of the dancefloor, where many of us, for the first time, became ourselves. It is in these often-furtive club spaces where queer and trans folks find catharsis, no longer limited in their self-expression or expected social performances. While Bradley captures the beauty of newfound embodied individual agency, the figures in these works also seem to blur together, collapsing the fixed borders that separate the self from the other. In essence, the triptych focuses on the generative sustenance afforded through queer social reproduction in spaces and bodies that often repulse a notion of social reproduction at all. Rather, “Pink Triangle” offers audiences a snapshot into how we make and remake ourselves through one another; through the sway and the swerve, in moments of scintillation.

Similarly, Bradley’s “Lavender Boy” visualises the different aspects of social, historical and cultural influence on developing his understanding of his own queerness through still life. While there are more obvious signifiers of this through books and badges, there are also subtle signs through his mother’s cardigan and a curtain tie in a pseudo-croisé devant pose, which gesture towards the fluidity of gendered performance of queer bodies. This is further explored in his mixed-media collage series, “Fruit Machine”. In scavenging found fashion images, and through playfully layering colours and textures, Bradley alchemizes these bodies in dream-like and more-than-human ways; all iridescent skins and shapeshifting faces. Through these works, Bradley demonstrates the possibility of a queer body that can shift, change and represent desires beyond what exists in the past or what could be in the future. Instead, there is a warmth through the neon-drenched potentiality of what can happen in the here and now.

These euphoric resonances that move throughout the show culminate in “Boy with Horses on the Seashore”, a reimagining of a childhood photo where Bradley places his boy-self on a giant My Little Pony figurine: her butter-golden head reared proudly towards the sky, while her plastic pink mane and tail twist and turn, just like the “Lavender Boy” curtain tie. What is profound about this piece is that it is just as familiar as it is unfamiliar, where the ‘gap’ of the real horse is replaced by a queerer (desired) memory. In all its magic and mysticism, it compliments the works presented by Doyle through its uncanniness, whereby the presence of the figurine represents the subversive qualities of queerness, while simultaneously acknowledging its deviance in relation to cis-heterodominant cultures.

Stephen Doyle’s presentation of works wrangles with the many-headed hydra of rage: from fury at the rise of fascism, to an outcry of anger at the ever-shrinking existence of queer spaces. Doyle’s collection, though critical, harnesses such rage as political force and uses it as a palette for their paintings. In “Anathema”, a disembodied Christ surveys the world, headless. Behind the hanging head of Christ, a mirror is cast unto all of us in the buildings below, where thousands more (headless) silent Sons of God still stand, and stare motionless in all our everyday spaces. Doyle’s positioning of Christ’s head away from the mirror suggests a refusal of the Church to face up to its sins, hiding from its own hypocrisy while continuing to exert enormous power socially, institutionally, spatially; unafraid to take up room.

Doyle’s collaborative painting with FELISPEAKS, “Bent Bastards”, emphasises the weaponisation of language against marginalised and minoritised people, whereby we no longer get to decide who we are, but rather it is the others–ironically, the outsiders of our lives–who instead forcibly name us. Draped in derogatory banners, Doyle looks on, and FELISPEAKS looks out at the audience who watches them. While the slurs fall around the figures, there is a quiet strength in the painting that is not just built from reverse discourse, where Doyle and FELISPEAKS might reclaim their ‘bentness’. Rather, the queer bodies–queer in all of its expanded meanings to signal outside normalcy–look outward, onward and inward extending their gaze far beyond the boundaries of the painting, penetrating the powers that define identities into narrow categories. In doing so, it doubly challenges conceptions of our allegedly progressive ‘New Ireland’ that celebrates equality, diversity and inclusion. This is a theme which is also illuminated in the ember light of “A Relentlessness”, where the central figure is subsumed by far-right social media content, and cannot look away from its horrors. In a sense, it offers the inverse of “Anathema”, as those with less power within society have no choice in overlooking oppression, but instead must bear the brunt of it.

Despite the negative affect which seems to dominate these works, there is an overt comfort and safety in “Our Nest”, where the figures of Doyle and their partner, reclined and splayed in ways that push against the normative standards of sitting. Here, Doyle shifts the colours to more gentle pastel pinks and purples. The audience’s view of how these queer bodies fold into one another lovingly, however, is also obscured by a thin, white transparent curtain. Much of recent positive developments in LGBTQIA+ liveability in Ireland has required the sacrifice of a total divulgence of personal and intimate matters, but here, this access is on the couple’s own terms. In a sense, it mimics the nature of Bradley’s triptych, but with inverted intentions unsettling notions of where we can be ourselves, and where we can make home in these fleeting, fluctuating spaces that are consistently subject to scrutiny.

In all its fullness, Dysphoric Euphoria is a testament to what it means to live in the swerve, particularly in these uncertain and ruinous times that attempt to straighten all in its path. It shows a diversity of queerness, in the thick of where we are, despite everything, making and remaking ourselves. The combined works of the artists show that the pleasure of being many selves is not always a privilege, and it does not always feel good. But the deep emotional dimensions of Bradley and Doyle’s paintings let us lean into all feelings. For feeling–good, bad or in-between–is what reminds us that we are human in a world that routinely tells us that we are not, or has refuted that we have ever existed. Instead, the question Dysphoric Euphoria asks all of us–not just queer people–is: I exist and you exist, so how might we exist together? Because while the times we live in are unsettling and uncertain, there too must be bounty and beauty; nothing settles in the swerve.