Our worlds are made up of many faces. Not only those of close family and friends, but equally significant in their own way, those that fill our favorite cafes or pass us by on neighborhood streets. When artist Larry Stanton took his sketchbook out to the bars around his Greenwich Village studio in the late 1970s, avidly sketching the strangers he had befriended for an evening or two, he couldn’t have known he was documenting a scene that was on the brink of disappearing.

“The youngsters had come to New York to obtain the freedom they didn’t find at home,” Stanton’s close friend and lover Arthur Lambert recently recalled for a new monograph of his work. “Many of them lost all they hoped for when they succumbed to AIDS. A great many of his models died soon after he drew them, so his work became a testament to the young men, a record of their short existence, a sort of memorial.”

Some of these portraits of friends, lovers, passing acquaintances, and several of Stanton himself, are on view at Apalazzo Gallery, aptly named for the grand historic building it occupies in the city of Brescia in northern Italy. “Images” runs through January 6, 2025. The artist’s colorful crayon drawings, for the most part small, closely-cropped studies of fresh-faced young men, pop against the palazzo’s airily elegant interiors, their white walls elevated by ornate gilded detailing and frescoes that sprawl over the ceilings.

Installation view of “Larry Stanton: Images” at Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy in 2024. Gallery. Photo: Melania Della Grave DSL_Studio, courtesy the artist and Apalazzo.

Lambert, who still lives with many of Stanton’s portraits in his Manhattan apartment, most admires them for how their vibrant palettes catch the eye and emphasize the “lively and innocent” nature of subjects who “didn’t have the time or life experience to build up character in their faces.” Nonetheless, they meet our gaze, defying us to forget.

Stanton was born in Long Island in 1947 and raised on a dairy farm in the Catskills town of Delhi. He moved to Manhattan in his late teens and lasted a single semester at Cooper Union before dropping out. He worked at the famed dessert parlor/ creative nexus Serendipity 3 on 60th Street and aligned himself with the city’s gay demimonde. It wasn’t long before he met Lambert, a lawyer some 15 years his senior, and they began hosting seemingly endless parties in the Fire Island Pines.

During a brief stint living together in L.A., the pair met the dealer Nicholas Wilder for dinner and were introduced to David Hockney, with whom they immediately hit it off. Stanton greatly admired the British artist, at one time doing a series of paintings of pools and interiors in evident homage. In return, Hockney took Stanton to glamorous, star-studded balls in London and once said of him: “People make their own faces and Larry knew this instinctively.”

Larry Stanton, Henry (Geldzahler) at Fire Island. Courtesy the Estate of Larry Stanton and Apalazzo Gallery.

Lambert and Stanton’s circle eventually extended to include Henry Geldzahler, a celebrated curator of contemporary art at the Met, artist Ellsworth Kelly, and writer Christopher Isherwood. Later, Stanton’s 10th Street studio became a preferred hang out for artists like Ross Bleckner and Izhar Patkin and writers Dennis Cooper and Donald Britton.

A spirit of non-stop fun came to an abrupt end in 1975, when the death of Stanton’s mother caused him to have a serious nervous breakdown. He spent a year at St. Vincent’s Hospital Psychiatry Department, where he formed a strong bond with his therapist Dr. Julia Mayo. Perhaps it was her mentorship that convinced him, upon being discharged, to start taking his aspirations as an artist more seriously.

By the early 1980s, however, a few of Lambert and Stanton’s friends were starting to get fatally sick and the artist himself was suffering repeated bouts of shingles. With no test at that time for HIV, he was eventually diagnosed with PCP pneumonia and admitted to hospital. There he began to produce affecting ruminations on paper that reflect the shock of grappling with such a sudden change of fortunes.

Larry Stanton, Richie (1982). Courtesy the Estate of Larry Stanton and Apalazzo Gallery.

In one, a sketch of two sobbing men is captioned “tears of anger, pain, sadness, fear” and dated September 25. It would later be turned into a poster for AIDS awareness. Other drawings bear phrases like “I am not afraid of dying, a little sad but not defeated,” and “I’m going to make it.”

As his condition worsened, Stanton had hoped to avoid the indignities of intensive care. Ignoring his wishes, the doctors kept him physically confined to prevent him from resisting intubation. He died on October 18, 1984 at the age of 37. The crowds that attended his funeral overwhelmed the First Presbyterian Church in which it was held, spilling out into the street.

Shortly after enduring the tragedy of of Stanton’s death, his friends collaborated to preserve his artistic legacy. By 1984, he had sold just seven paintings but his reputation was on the rise after he had received a solo show at Holly Solomon Gallery the previous year and was included in the survey exhibition “Portraits” at P.S. 1 that spring. In 1986, his achievements were archived in the book “Larry Stanton: Painting and Drawing,” which featured texts by Hockney, Geldzahler, Mayo, and Lambert.

Installation view of “Larry Stanton: Images” at Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy in 2024. Gallery. Photo: Melania Della Grave DSL_Studio, courtesy the artist and Apalazzo.

For a period of more than three decades, however, Stanton remained virtually unknown to all but a dedicated few. In 2018, the Italian theatre director Fabio Cherstich stumbled on his practice by chance and made contact with Lambert, the only representative of Stanton’s estate, with the aim of reviving the artist’s reputation.

Thanks to these efforts, since 2020, Stanton been the subject of a growing number of exhibitions at venues in Switzerland, Italy, Japan, Korea, and New York. This weekend, December 14-16, Chertisch is staging three performances at La Mama in Manhattan during which he will recount stories from the city’s queer art scene of the 1980s, with a spotlight on Stanton and fellow artists Patrick Angus and Darrell Ellis.

“Larry Stanton: Images” is on view at Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy until January 6, 2025. The book “Think of Me When It Thunders” was published by Apartamento in 2022.