• Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Personal Effects, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York– based artist Travis Boyer (b. 1979, Fort Worth, Texas, US) and his first solo exhibition in Switzerland. Executed with dyes on silk velvet, Boyer’s works explore how surfaces accrue meaning, inviting reflection on ornament, cultural memory, and queer embodiment.
  • Rich in texture and layered with historical references, the works in Personal Effects transform the decorative into the political and the sentimental into the critical. Through a fusion of self-styling, camp, and material sophistication, Boyer articulates a painterly language that embraces excess, ambiguity, and seduction.
     
    Velvet is both medium and metaphor in Boyer’s work. As a substrate, it carries a unique material history: once a fabric of aristocratic luxury, later a marker of bourgeois domesticity and, by the 1970s, a fabric of countercultural kitsch. In Boyer’s hands, this complex lineage is neither rejected nor idealized. He paints with a category of dyes known as protein dyes, used for animal substrates such as silk, wool, and hair, exploiting the material’s capacity for optical depth. Painting on both the reverse and front sides of the fabric, he allows pigments to bleed through or be pressed in. For this furry surface, he uses tools from beauty culture—steamers, atomizers, and industrial hairdryers—to sculpt and manipulate shifting planes of color and texture.
     
    These paintings refuse to be flattened, literally or metaphorically. As the velvet’s pile refracts light, the images emerge and recede, shimmer and dissolve. There is no single point of view; the viewer must move, look closely, and engage with all visual perceptions. In an age dominated by slick digital images and scrollable content, Boyer’s work demands embodied looking. His surfaces are not passive grounds but performative, unstable, and assertive.
     
    The motifs that populate Personal Effects are drawn from an archive of adornment: false eyelashes, thigh-high boots, jewelry, rhinestone belts, feathers, and fragments of costumes. They are objects that signify identity, aspiration, and transformation. 
     
  • Travis Boyer Belts Encore, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 152.5 x 108.5 cm (60 x...
    Travis Boyer
    Belts Encore, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    152.5 x 108.5 cm (60 x 42 ¾ in.)
    156.5 x 113 cm (61 ⅝ x 44 ½ in.), framed
     
    The large painting Belts Encore strikes on several themes from Boyer's biography. Growing up in Texas, the artist was surrounded by people wearing belts with opulent buckles. “When you are a gay boy and you grow up in Texas, there are these little glimpses of potential identities…and you had to give it up,” he says. “You’re not going to go on a date like your friends are going on a date. You're not going to be in that Nutcracker again next year.” These glimpses of potential identities are revisited in silk velvet in “Personal Effects,” where Boyer investigates them in his current life as an artist in New York. 
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  • Travis Boyer Divergent False Lashes , 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 63.5 x 46 cm...
    Travis Boyer
    Divergent False Lashes , 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    63.5 x 46 cm (28 x 25 in.)
    67.5 x 50 cm (26 ⅝ x 19 ¾ in.), framed
     
    In Divergent False Lashes, two colorful false eyelashes dance suspended in air, waiting for willing eyes.
    False eyelashes are a staple in drag makeup, often used to create dramatic and exaggerated looks. They are a key tool for transforming into different characters and embodying heightened femininity or androgyny. Writer Elyssa Goodman describes Boyer’s method as one of “self-seduction,” a practice of convincing oneself to believe in the possibility of expression through materials that are unruly, feminized, and historically devalued.
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  • Some works function as still lifes: Green Carnation Pink Dragonfruit evokes Oscar Wilde’s coded floral hanky code of queerness, while Brooches Click Clack presents a constellation of baubles that seem to jostle and whisper among themselves. 
  • Travis Boyer Green Carnation Pink Dragonfruit, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 103 x 72.5 cm...
    Travis Boyer
    Green Carnation Pink Dragonfruit, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    103 x 72.5 cm (40 5/8 x 28 5/8 in.)
    105 cm x 75 cm, (41.5 x 29.5 in.), framed

     

    The painting Green carnation pink dragonfruit bears a boutonniere, chronicling Boyer’s long-term interest in carnations, often a symbol of love and fascination.

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  • Travis Boyer The Natural Pose, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 103.2 x 72.7 cm (40...
    Travis Boyer
    The Natural Pose, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    103.2 x 72.7 cm (40 ⅝ x 28 ⅝ in.)
    105 cm x 75 cm, (41.5 x 29.5 in.), framed
     
    Several paintings in the exhibiton feature adornment of a different kind, of space and partnership. In The Natural Pose, we meet those carnations again, not to mention the taut posterior of a friend hidden amongst their petals. The Natural Pose is affected by Boyer’s friend Craig, who also joins him for drawing sessions. A “loaded paintbrush stroke” is inspired by his friend Marley. He sees collectivity in the way many different inputs, techniques, and community influences combine in a single painting to push a story forward, even if he’s making it on his own.
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  • Travis Boyer Brooches Click Clack, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 103 x 72.5 cm (40...
    Travis Boyer
    Brooches Click Clack, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    103 x 72.5 cm (40 5/8 x 28 5/8 in.)
    105 cm x 75 cm, (41.5 x 29.5 in.), framed
     
    In Brooches click clack, a collection of baubles tilt gently against each other in varying hues. According to Boy, 'jewelry has a life of its own and gives the wearer a new life as well. Or, with many of the objects existing within queer symbology, perhaps the life one always wanted'. 
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  • Travis Boyer Three Whiff Flurry, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 63.5 x 46 cm (25...
    Travis Boyer
    Three Whiff Flurry, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    63.5 x 46 cm (25 x 18 ⅛ in.)
    67.5 x 50 cm (26 ⅝ x 19 ¾ in.), framed
     
    The painting Three Whiff Flurry (and the related work Fluorescent) lies in between, with cascading arrays of ostrich feathers. Boyer thought of filmic backstages of cabaret and theatre spaces, “how cool and intimate and striking they are,” he says. “They're somehow permanently dark, despite all these makeup table lights. And there's just costumes and feathers and people coming on and off stage, and it's an almost exclusively woman and queer-coded space. If a man comes in, it's just to deliver flowers or he's usually gay, too,” he continues. “How beautiful and loaded that image.”
     
    Travis Boyer creates his distinctive and diverse world of color by applying protein-based dye to both sides of white silk velvet. Where the colors meet, he weaves them together, producing transitions that evoke the blending of eyeshadow as well as the fluid dispersal of watercolor upon contact with water. Set against a backdrop of emerald green, chestnut brown, and washed-out black tones, the three feathers in Three Whiff Flurry emerge into view. The texture of the silk velvet merges seamlessly with the pigments, recalling the appearance of wet moss adorned with droplets of water or the veining of a vintage silver mirror. The color in the motifs unfolds delicately: with fine brushstrokes, Boyer has rendered the intricate details of each feather in shades of pink, aubergine, and royal blue, at times leaving areas of the white velvet untouched.
  • Travis Boyer Fluorescents, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 63.5 x 46 cm (25 x 18...
    Travis Boyer
    Fluorescents, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    63.5 x 46 cm (25 x 18 ⅛ in.)
    67.5 x 50 cm (26 ⅝ x 19 ¾ in.), framed
     
    The painting Fluorescents (and the related work Three Whiff Flurry) lies in between, with cascading arrays of ostrich feathers. Boyer thought of filmic backstages of cabaret and theatre spaces, “how cool and intimate and striking they are,” he says. “They're somehow permanently dark, despite all these makeup table lights. And there's just costumes and feathers and people coming on and off stage, and it's an almost exclusively woman and queer-coded space. If a man comes in, it's just to deliver flowers or he's usually gay, too,” he continues. “How beautiful and loaded that image.”
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  • Others, such as Born to Do This, and Boots Continuum, depict adorned torsos in states of becoming. These figures are not portraits, but embodied ideas - costumed, faceless, and full of presence.
  • Travis Boyer Born to do this, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 152.5 x 108.5 cm...
    Travis Boyer
    Born to do this, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    152.5 x 108.5 cm (60 x 42 3/4 in.)
    156.5 x 113 cm (61 ⅝ x 44 ½ in.), framed
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  • Travis Boyer Boots Continuum, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 152.5 x 108.5 cm (60 x...
    Travis Boyer
    Boots Continuum, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    152.5 x 108.5 cm (60 x 42 3/4 in.)
    156.5 x 113 cm (61 ⅝ x 44 ½ in.), framed
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  • Travis Boyer Michael the acrobat, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 152.5 x 108.5 cm (60...
    Travis Boyer
    Michael the acrobat, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    152.5 x 108.5 cm (60 x 42 ¾ in.)
    156.5 x 113 cm (61 ⅝ x 44 ½ in.), framed

     

    In Michael the Acrobat, the velvet itself looks back: faint printed mask patterns beneath the dye recall the layered gazes of Commedia figures. As viewers attempt to fix the image, their position shifts; the work resists capture. It is this instability that becomes a space of freedom. As the artist notes, his figures are not made to be looked at passively or consumed as spectacle. They invite the viewer to participate, to conspire, to recognize themselves.

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  • Other works explore relationships and ritual through atmospheric metaphor. Third Keeps Taut, with its trio of burning candles, alludes to intimacy and triangulation, while Suggestion Diabolique hints at seduction and spectacle through its play of light and shadow. Feel the Night is Made of Rocks presents paired crystals as emblems of mirrored longing, echoing the doubled dynamics of queer kinship. In these pieces, objects serve not as props but as witnesses, accumulating memory, storing desire, and animating the silent performances of daily survival.
     
  • Writer Elyssa Goodman describes Boyer’s method as one of “self-seduction,” a practice of convincing oneself to believe in the possibility of expression through materials that are unruly, feminized, and historically devalued. Like his grandmother Virginia Odette Canada, who the artist recalls ritualistically dying her eyelashes while watching Oprah, Boyer approaches beauty as both labor and play. Adornment becomes a technology of the self, a form of armor and celebration.
     
    A central reference in Personal Effects, as noted by art historian Susanna Cole, is the figure of Pierrot, the tragicomic clown of the Commedia dell’Arte. From Watteau’s Gilles to Picasso’s blue-period acrobats, Pierrot has served as a blank slate onto which artists project melancholia, marginality, and modernist dislocation. Boyer, however, queers the figure through what theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls disidentification: a process by which minoritarian subjects reclaim dominant codes and recode them toward liberation. In Boyer’s reimagination, Pierrot is not the butt of the joke but the center of the stage - confident, adorned, and conspiratorial.
     
    While Boyer is grounded in contemporary queer culture, his work draws equally from art historical references, particularly the Rococo. Like Fragonard and Boucher, he collapses distinctions between painting and the decorative arts. Works like Bow Bound and Nuit d’Amour echo the sensuous, pastel-toned indulgence of Rococo interiors, but they do so with a knowing wink. There is a deliberate exaggeration, an embrace of what Susan Sontag called the “democratic spirit of camp.”
     
  • Yet Boyer is not interested in irony for its own sake. Rather, his work reclaims surface from the Modernist suspicion that deemed ornament as excess and kitsch as cultural failure. He operates in a lineage that includes Joyce Pensato, Ulrike Müller, and K8 Hardy - artists who have queered the legacy of Abstract Expressionism through humor, bodily reference, and feminist rage. Where Clement Greenberg demanded flatness and disinterest, Boyer offers pile, sparkle, and intimacy.
     
    As critic Thomas Love observes, Boyer’s velvet paintings subvert the binary of surface and depth. They demonstrate that surfaces, especially those that are tactile, adorned, and performative, can carry profound meaning. Boyer’s paintings may appear decorative, but their demands are conceptual. They propose an expanded field of painting that includes the politics of looking, the histories of gendered labor, and the poetics of transformation.
     
    Throughout the exhibition, Boyer constructs a constellation of works that navigate between still life and staged performance. As in all of his paintings, these are not just representations, but rehearsals of possible selves. In this way, Personal Effects becomes more than an exhibition but rather a stage. Boyer’s velvet panels do not merely depict; they perform. They shimmer with accumulated meaning, drawing on personal memory and shared cultural codes. Boyer’s work celebrates the power of self-fashioning as both survival and resistance, and creates complex, glamorous narratives about seduction.
  • Travis Boyer Champagne Bursts, 2025 Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame 63.5 x 46 cm (28 x...
    Travis Boyer
    Champagne Bursts, 2025
    Dye on silk velvet on panel in artist frame
    63.5 x 46 cm (28 x 25 in.)
    67.5 x 50 cm (26 ⅝ x 19 ¾ in.), framed
     
    Champagne bursts is one of several paintings by Boyer that include the theme of eruption and outbursting fluids. The bursts are always shown in pairs or more. The work has a sexual undertone combined with the lush glamour and luxury excesses usually associated with the consumption of champagne.  
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  • Travis Boyer Passions Confuses Forms, 2024 Dye on silk velvet on aluminum panel in artist frame 66 x 46 cm...
    Travis Boyer
    Passions Confuses Forms, 2024
    Dye on silk velvet on aluminum panel in artist frame
    66 x 46 cm (26 x 18 ⅛ in.)
    67.5 x 50 cm (26 ⅝ x 19 ¾ in.), framed
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  • About the artist: Travis Boyer (b. 1979 in Fort Worth, TX) lives and works in New York, NY. In 2012,...
    About the artist: Travis Boyer (b. 1979 in Fort Worth, TX) lives and works in New York, NY. In 2012, Boyer graduated with an MFA from Bard College, NY. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions in several galleries and art centers in America and Europe: Noon Projects, Los Angeles (2023); Signal Gallery, New York (2021); False Flag, New York (2019); Hello Project Gallery, Houston (2015); Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York (2014); Studio 17, Stavanger, Norway (2014); Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2013). In 2021, he took part in the Texas Biennal. He had residencies at Nesflaten Skule, Suldal, Norway (2015); and at the Shandaken Project, Shandaken, New York (2012) among others. His works are in the collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire, all in the US.
  • For further informations, please contact: inquiries@peterkilchmann.com