The Minotaur, the beast of the labyrinth with the head of a bull and the body of a man, was a figure feared by the Ancient Greeks: a lonesome monster with an unending appetite, a dark shadow in a maze corridor. King Minos would annually throw a set of Athenian virgins into the labyrinth to feed this creature. And so the Minotaur would live his life like this: wandering the maze, full-bellied, alone, until another offering arrived. One day, the hero Theseus came instead, battled him, and slayed the monster, and one has to wonder if it wasn’t a bit of relief. Finally, the Minotaur had some company. This beast is half man after all: perhaps the only way he knew how not to be alone was to be in battle.

RF. Alvarez’s newest body of work, exhibiting with Martha’s in his hometown of Austin, Texas, uses the backdrop of the Minotaur myth to explore the dichotomy between loneliness and belonging. Alvarez’s work often deals with the expectations of masculinity – especially that of the American west – and the tension between a cowboy heritage and a queer identity. To him, there is much the cowboy can learn from the belonging that comes from a queer community and it boils down to something perhaps lost to the Minotaur's non-human half: tenderness.

Indeed, in the 2000 novel The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break, author Steven Sherrill writes, “The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough-hewn and many-chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps—the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life—is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.”

In this body of work, Alvarez presents visions of the life he lives with his partner and close friends in Austin, imbuing them with art historical references and a bit of allegory. We see Alvarez himself laying across his male friends, being held up by their camaraderie; we see a flower arrangement his husband made for him, bursting and wilting and full of the life and death and joy and sorrow of the multifaceted partnership they’ve maintained. We see Alvarez’s group of friends around a table – perhaps from the artist’s own perspective – cocooned in the warmth of each other's presence. And we see the leftovers of that table, the dinner scraps, the lonely remnants of a moment spent in joy and indulgence. Is this indulgence – central to the queer identity – just a distraction from the labyrinth of loneliness? Or does something remain: the dim flicker of a feeling of having been, at long last, seen?

These works juxtapose with a cowboy figure (depicted alone against the textured black background that has come to define Alvarez’s work) who is perhaps our Minotaur. Though, perhaps he is our Theseus. Alvarez leaves his relationship to the myth intentionally vague. This is no battle between external identities but rather a reconciliation of the self. Alvarez is looking back at his life, the people in it, the fleeting moments, and wondering if his heart is able to withstand all this tenderness. Because of course these moments, like a wilting poppy or a candle in the night, won’t last. Perhaps it is Alvarez himself who is the Minotaur, and these works are his labyrinth, yet his is full of love.

For the exhibition itself, Alvarez has worked with Martha’s to transform the gallery into a speakeasy, serving cocktails, hiding the front doors behind red velvet curtains, and featuring live performances. The speakeasy has a long history of providing solace to the queer community, and the fleeting nature of this “bar” speaks to the themes of the body of work. In his appropriately named work The Labyrinth of Solitude, philosopher Octavio Paz writes that during the fiesta, “time is no longer succession, and becomes what it originally was and is: the present, in which past and future are reconciled.” And so, to see this body of work, Alvarez invites us to The Minotaur Bar, to experience a moment of pushing back against the solitude of a monstrous heart.