TENDER TO THE TOUCH
Paris, July 2025
Queer art wasn’t meant for galleries. It belonged in the illustration books discovered in our teens, Tumblr nudes reblogged under the covers, the bookshops we duck into alone. Sacred spaces that exist only to those who go looking. POL ANGLADA honours that legacy. In Walking on Eggshells, queerness isn’t public or mainstream. Instead, it’s tender. Snapshots of intimacy are rough, unconcerned with performance. That rawness cracks the subjects open, their vulnerability blooming in full view.
The exhibit, currently on display at the CG Williams Gallery in London, marks the first since the Catalonian-born, Paris-based artist completed his residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation. The three-month stay gave him a luxury he rarely has: time. Working full-time as a senior designer at Christian Dior Couture, his illustrations are created in tandem with a busy career. And, while usually his artistry thrives in the duality of his creativity, Walking on Eggshells took over six months to complete.
The meditative period bred a tenderness, one that is progressively hard to come by. In the age of post-corporate Pride, queerness has been gutted twice: first of the subversiveness that made it dangerous, then of the sponsors it scrubbed itself clean for. Pol draws queer intimacy at its rawest, as it was before the age of algorithmically-friendly desire. For him, it’s there that we find something common to us all: the need to connect. We catch up with the artist in the last few weeks of his exhibit to discuss voyeurism, British men, and the beauty of challenging the norm.
Hi! How are you?
Right now, it's quite a busy moment because of work. I was very happy with the outcome of the exhibition. It was a good moment to put it out.
Is there any kind of relief when an exhibition finally debuts?
You know, because of the time I spend drawing, I end up listening to podcasts a lot. I heard Celine Song say in Evan Ross Katz’s show… he asked her something similar, and she said it feels like keeping a secret for a very long time, and you’re finally able to release [it]. I agree with that.
Is there any excitement there? Is there anxiety?
Excitement, nervousness. Usually, I have more immediate work that I wouldn’t take more than a month to finish a piece. But working on Walking on Eggshells took a more paused rhythm. It took me almost six months to finish.
Speaking of Walking on Eggshells, we started at the end of the process, but how did it start?
At the end of 2023, I had the opportunity to have a summer residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation. I had been close with the foundation since 2022, when I did my first exhibit in LA. It’s a beautiful, close relationship. At some point, Durk Dehner, back when he was head of the foundation, offered me the possibility to live in the foundation and live there for three months and develop a body of work.
During that time, aside from working on a big series of gouache paintings and a fun zine I later released, I had the chance to work on two massive drawings, almost two meters tall, all in coloured pencil. That was special. Because of how I work in Paris, with a daytime job, it was a chance to take longer and have a meditative process. Since coming from LA, I knew I wanted to do another series of bigger drawings, to enjoy slowing down.
Do you find that your time at the foundation changed the way you thought about your process?
Definitely. It was crazy, right? Even though I have a creative daytime job as a designer, that time at the foundation was one in a million. All your concerns are reduced to drawing every day. It was beautiful, I’m not going to lie. But I’m also someone who enjoys variety and the challenge that my job brings. So, it was a challenge too, like, understanding that this was a bubble. How would it work if I had to do this in reality?
In my daytime job, results are expected quite quickly. This was more of a personal exercise to know different tempos within yourself. The process is interesting not just because of the growth of the piece, but how you navigate through it as the author, the maker. The exhibition's biggest vulnerability and intimacy come from the process itself.
You mentioned your creative job. Do you find that your two creative outlets, fashion and art, complement each other? Could you do one without the other?
I don’t want to have to choose. I don’t know if they complement each other, but they definitely exist in different parts of my brain. They exist in different parts of who I am, as a creative and as a person. One of my favourite things in my daytime job is being part of a team, working with colleagues, feedback, perspective. I’m a team player.
Whereas illustration is different. It’s solo time. It’s meditative. It’s a moment between you and silence. Or just picking your brain. Growing up, my grandma was a seamstress, and I would watch her working on her clients’ pieces. I spent a lot of time drawing, too, because my dad draws in his spare time. I like existing between these two worlds and not having to choose or compromise..
I read you spent a long time in London. The exhibition is in London too. Does the exhibit reflect anything about your time in the UK?
Not in any work directly. But London was the first city I lived in as a young man. I feel very connected to it, from punk music to fashion, history and art. British men… there's something very cartoonish and handsome about them in a weird way. So, no, the exhibition doesn’t have anything to do with England directly, but it was important for me to open the exhibition in London because Caspar [Giorgio Williams] lives and works here. He just opened his new space, CG Williams Gallery, earlier this year. He’s been a loyal supporter of my work from the beginning.
Something that interests me about your work is that it feels voyeuristic. Like we’re observing a perception of something, rather than the object itself…
. I don’t see myself as a voyeur per se. Those are fragments I sketch in my studio, stills from internet compositions or anonymous images. I like the feeling of confronting an image and focusing on what catches your attention most. That wandering feeling, when you let yourself get lost in it. And yes, sometimes I include inviting or enticing pictures, so the viewer can continue the scene in their own head, create their own beginning and end for this little moment that I captured from my point of view.
You mentioned earlier this interesting element of intimacy in your work. What attracts you to that?
I think what attracts me to intimacy and vulnerability is that, ultimately, those are two very radical feelings. It’s about coming to terms with who you are, how you are, with what makes you uncomfortable, with what makes you keen on yourself. And I think those are some of the most interesting and extraordinary parts of the psyche. Especially in the current climate, where differences between humans seem to be more important than their own respect for existing, I think that coming as intimate and as vulnerable as one is, it’s quite radical.
It’s interesting you mention the dystopian environment we’re all living in. As an artist, do you feel any weight to translate what you feel about the world around you?
I don’t know if it’s a way to translate or a way to escape or maybe a way to wander. As you said, we live in dystopian times. You scroll on your phone and see a 30-step skincare routine, Palestinians being completely obliterated, and then something totally trivial. It’s so fucked up. That takes a toll on our mental health. Sadly, I don’t think my drawings are the space to reflect that directly. They’re more of a space for escaping. As a human, though, what we can do is donate, help, acknowledge, and get informed; that’s how I try to digest what’s going on around me.
If I may, to me, you sort of do comment on it. It’s what you were saying about intimacy as a common trait between us all. To, you’re appealing to that vulnerability we all share.
That’s certainly a common point between all of us. Beyond the want and need to be desired or to connect with others, it starts by being intimate with ourselves: our own insecurities, turn-ons, interior worlds and universes. Where you can lose yourself, grow, be scared, or think about someone. That, to me, is a radical take on humanity. Aside from being kind, it takes courage, especially for those who are willing to be vulnerable despite the backlash. That’s a sign of bravery.
It’s also interesting to think of sexual intimacy as the ultimate excuse to connect, something so instinctual that it bypasses prejudice or politics. You’ve mentioned before that you don’t use live models. Sometimes you use reference images, but do you draw from memory often?
Not for this exhibition, no. I do draw from memory on other occasions, but usually, especially with the voyeuristic element we discussed, [my references] come from my own experiences. I was an early Tumblr user and aficionado. It was the era of Tumblr porn, internet debauchery, Next Door Studios… That’s something I still find pure and electric. There was a sense of anonymity and youth that I think is still really interesting.
Gay people, especially in the public eye, have lost that punk, irreverent, challenging edge. Everything’s become so politically correct. There are porn websites asking for age verification, people are upset with kinky folks at Pride... It’s wild. Sex has been painted over the gay sexual liberation movement in a way that’s become sanitised. Everything’s too polished. That early internet era, especially Tumblr, was full of these banks of images, anonymous but raw. Not AI-generated. It was spontaneous, messy, and very human. That’s something I’ve always drawn inspiration from.
That makes so much sense. There’s such rawness in your work. If those early days of Tumblr resurfaced, we would all be in trouble. Speaking of youth, you’ve mentioned before that your interest in art and queer art was sparked by some of the literature you found at home. What were some of your earliest references?
Yeah. It wasn’t literature per se. My dad, as I mentioned, draws as a hobby. He grew up in Spain during the dictatorship, when censorship was heavy, but he managed to get some spicy comics from Italy and France. I remember being a horny and curious teenager and stumbling across them. My parents are big readers, so there were lots of books at home. I remember finding those comics and being completely blown away. It was just me and the comic and nobody else. All the feelings it made me feel, all the questions it sparked, it was like being a spectator.
Do you remember any specific comics or images that stuck with you?
Yes, there was Milo Manara, an Italian illustrator who used watercolours. The first time I saw a drawing of a butt that made me horny, it was his. Probably a woman’s butt, too, but the most beautiful watercolours. And then Enki Bilal, he’s French. He did this Blade Runner–style series with Egyptian gods and animal faces. Naked boys, men, and women in spaceships that looked like steam rooms. Very ‘80s, kind of spooky.
That sounds incredible…
Yeah, and then there was this comic called Grand Xerox. It was like a punk Frankenstein with a very young girlfriend, very “What the fuck is going on?” But I thought it was genius.
That’s everything. My teenage mind would’ve exploded.
And then, obviously, from there it led to discovering Tom of Finland and others. I remember one of the first times I came to the UK, when I was maybe 15 or 16, I went to a gay bookstore near Soho and found a copy of Harry Bush’s Hard Boys. That blew my mind. And then later on, the internet.
I think part of the magic of queer art is that it’s had a very clear function in documenting the underground before it was mainstream…
If you think about it, underground queer culture has always been preserved through community, through people living true to themselves, even while marginalised. The beauty of queer art is that it lives outside galleries. It lives in fanzines, punk shows, drag performances, BDSM events. That’s where true beauty and uniqueness exist, in the unknown, in the irreverent and subversive. In anything that challenges the norm.
Your art feels like it exists in that same space. But now we’re in a time when queer art is also welcomed in galleries – Walking on Eggshells is proof of it. How do you reconcile that duality when putting together an exhibit?
I don’t actually do that many gallery shows, to be honest. Up to now, I’ve been more interested in working with self-publications and different media, like T-shirts and prints. That’s sometimes a faster way to share a message. But I think it’s brilliant. It’s great to see how far we’ve come. We don’t need an artist to die to have people recognise their work.
The exhibition Walking on Eggshells is on view until September 3rd, 2025 at CG Williams Gallery in London.
Interview by Pedro Vasconcelos
All artworks and pictures: Courtesy of the Artist and C.G.Williams, London. Photo by Melissa Castro Duarte