People attend Paul Stanley’s solo show Joy and Rebellion, in Toronto, on Nov. 23.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
At the Peter Triantos Art Gallery on Thursday evening, people nibbled cherry tomatoes, nursed Greek wine and took in the work of a new artist who is already considered something of a rock star. His name is Paul Stanley, frontman of the legendary band Kiss. He likes to abstract all night and portrait every day.
“Paul is a great artist, and we’re honoured to have his work here,” says the gallery’s namesake owner. The big, bold, splashily coloured canvases on the walls go for up to $80,000, and an energized Triantos confides that a few tire-kickers had already expressed serious interest in the paintings. “I’ve been blown away by the reaction.”
New Yorker Stanley has a connection to Toronto. Theatregoers remember that he was the final Phantom in the 10-year Toronto run of The Phantom of the Opera that ended in 1999. His history with the town goes back much further.
Peter Triantos and his wife Seraphina pose next to Paul Stanley’s Joy and Rebellion, in Toronto, on Nov. 23.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
On June 15, 1974, the nascent Kiss played Massey Hall as the opening act for glam-rock heroes the New York Dolls. The pairing was ironic. Cartoon-costumed in face paint and studded black leather, the automaton-like members of Kiss out-dolled everybody. The unimpressed Globe and Mail music critic Robert Martin wrote that Stanley and the band “produced a lot of noise and smoke and then disappeared.”
Nearly 50 years later, with founding members Stanley and Gene Simmons leading the band, Kiss is still at it, producing much smoke and noise on its current farewell tour. As for disappearing, well, yeah, that too.
The reception for the singer’s art exhibit, Joy and Rebellion, was to coincide with a Kiss concert at Scotiabank Arena one night earlier. But the show was cancelled, just as the preceding concert in Ottawa was called off. Stanley, 71, is suffering from the flu and unable to “shout it out loud,” let alone fly across the arena on a zipline, as the spectacle performance calls for.
While the DJ at the gallery was pumping out a club remix of the 1979 Kiss hit I Was Made For Lovin’ You, Stanley was laid
A painting by Paul Stanley titled World of Joy and Rebellion.Supplied
up in a nearby hotel room. The day before, he had posted a photo of himself on Instagram, in bed and hooked up to an IV. “I’ve done everything possible to get onstage and be a part of the incredible 2 ½ hour celebration we planned,” he wrote to his fans, “but this flu has made it impossible.”
In addition to being a huge bummer to fans, the concert cancellations became part of a news story that broke internationally. On Wednesday morning, a speeding car crashed and exploded on the U.S. side of the Rainbow Bridge that connects to Canada. Initial speculation that terrorism was involved was apparently unfounded. Investigators believe the two Americans in the luxury Bentley, a man and a woman who did not survive the wreck, had planned to attend the Toronto Kiss concert.
The car crash and the called-off concerts mar a final tour of Canada that had begun so promisingly at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena earlier in the month. “After 50 years, any band that can still leave you wanting more is doing something right,” Vancouver Sun reviewer Stuart Derdeyn concluded.
Lily Li attends Paul Stanley’s solo show.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
The sense of wanting something more was the vibe at the gallery, where Stanley had been expected to make an appearance. Postponing the exhibition launch altogether was an idea seriously considered but ultimately dismissed. The show must go on, as they say (but did not say at the sold-out concert arenas in Ottawa and Toronto).
“We’re disappointed that Paul isn’t here, but it’s still a celebration,” Triantos says, almost convincingly. He’s been a Kiss fan since buying the band’s Dynasty album in 1979. “We’re honoured to have Paul’s work here.”
The work is abstract (though Stanley has done portraits, including self-portraits). The dozen unnamed pieces pop with all the extroversion, intensity and thick paint one might expect from the frontman of a band known for pyrotechnics, platform boots and shout-from-the-rooftop anthems.
“I love it,” says Michael Wekerle, the flashy financier and owner of the rock club the El Mocambo. “The texture is cool, and people are gravitating to it.”
Apparently. On a video call from Vancouver earlier in the tour, Stanley said the career sales of his oil paintings had passed US$24-million. Of course, that doesn’t mean the work is necessarily any good. Works by Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood may sell well, but a lot of the critics aren’t buying it.
People gather for the opening of Paul Stanley’s solo show “Joy and Rebellion.”Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
“Ronnie is infinitely better at playing the guitar than playing with a paintbrush,” Art Newspaper’s Louisa Buck told the Guardian newspaper in 2020. Like Buck, ArtReview editor-at-large Oliver Basciano was not impressed with Wood’s take on Picasso’s Guernica, even though the piece was being sold for charity. “Art is often about having a decent dollop of chutzpah, but this takes the biscuit.”
Can a rock star who crosses disciplines get a fair shake? Stanley, who has been painting for 20 years or so and who earned what he calls “begrudgingly favourable reviews” as the titular opera-haunting Phantom in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, doesn’t really care.
“There are certain people out there whose livelihood and salary depends upon making you believe that you need them to validate your opinion,” said the Love Gun rocker. “It’s pretty transparent to me. So, I’m not interested in a fair shake. I won – I already won.”
He’s not wrong. Kiss, never the darlings of the music press, has earned 30 gold-selling albums over its career. Fans, so loyal that they are known as the Kiss Army, support the band on the road even though Kiss hasn’t released a studio LP in more than a decade. Is Stanley fantastically rich? Let’s just say he can afford to hire someone to paint the trademark star on his face – The Starchild character is his Kiss persona – before he hits the stage each night.
He doesn’t, though.
“I certainly could, but why would I?” he asked. “Doing my own makeup is part of a transition and it’s part of a tradition. It’s almost ceremony, and the idea of sitting in a chair while someone else does it for me is the antithesis of who I am.”
Stanley will not be painting his face much longer now – there will be no make-up concerts (as it were) for the cancelled shows. The current End of the Road World Tour has just five dates left, including the live-streamed finale at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Dec. 2.
That is, if Stanley recovers from his illness in time. A third concert, in Knoxville on Friday, was also scrapped. The band’s manager, Doc McGhee (whose brother Scott McGhee played for the Toronto Argonauts in the 1980s) says the singer is on the mend and benefiting from Canada’s health care system: “He’s got three great doctors looking after him.”
If Kiss can’t go on stage without Stanley, the reception at the gallery managed without him. “His paintings are here,” says Triantos. “And if you listen, he’s speaking right now in this room.”