I walked into Triennale Milano thinking I knew what I was about to see: a story of loss, a set of names from the eighties that have been said so many times they risk becoming symbols rather than people. I left feeling something entirely different. Fabio Cherstich’s A Visual Diary is not a funeral piece. It is a room where love is practiced in public, tender, lucid, and quietly radical.
The setup is minimal: a table, a stool, two projections, sometimes a turntable and the glint of a mirror ball. The simplicity is deceptive because it opens a portal. As Fabio speaks and places images and music before us, New York in the 1980s rises with surprising clarity. You can almost hear the street noise, the club air, the small talk before a song. Not the cliché of the era but its texture, the feeling of finding a place where you are not alone.
The work orbits three artists whose lives were cut short by AIDS: Patrick Angus, Larry Stanton, and Darrel Ellis. Each had a distinct way of seeing the world. What unites them, in the way Fabio tells it, is not death but belonging. These stories are not about sex as spectacle; they are about the relief and the charge of being among one’s own, protected by a fragile yet luminous sense of community.
Patrick Angus painted hidden theatres. Not only the literal stages of places like the Gaiety or the Apollo Sauna, but the invisible stage that forms when strangers agree to inhabit the same risk and the same desire. When Angus painted strip clubs and porn cinemas, the main subject was never nudity but the audience itself: clerks, dandies, the shy, the bored, businessmen with briefcases in their laps. They were together, and that togetherness was the picture.
Fabio’s journey to understand Angus begins with a reproduction glimpsed on a phone and then takes him to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the home of Betty Angus, Patrick’s mother. Boxes of drawings slide from under beds, paintings hang between rakes and lawn tools in the garage. This is what real archives look like before institutions arrive: private geographies of care that persist because someone decides not to throw anything away. Betty becomes the keeper of her son’s memory, the silent guardian of a legacy the world had not yet learned to value. From that garage to the Whitney is a span of decades that a single sentence can compress, yet nothing about it was inevitable. One of Patrick’s drawings now hangs there as a gift from Fabio himself, a gesture that completes a circle of devotion between artist, mother, and custodian.
Larry Stanton’s life offers a counterpoint. He died in 1984, the same year Angus moved to New York. He was a magnet for love, a portraitist who captured faces not as symbols but as presences. Fabio speaks of Stanton’s homes in New York and Fire Island as social rooms with a jukebox at the center, a portrait studio disguised as a life among friends. The drawings carry phone numbers on the back. The community is in the graphite.
If Angus had Betty, Stanton had Arthur Lambert: lover, collector, custodian. Through Arthur, Stanton met David Hockney in Los Angeles in the late sixties, and through Arthur, his work was protected after his death. These are not anecdotes but lifelines. Without them, there would be no story to tell. The renewed attention to Stanton’s portraits today is not simply a correction in taste; it is a way of stitching back into the cultural fabric what the AIDS epidemic and the art market had left out.
Darrel Ellis takes the story somewhere else again. He projected photographs onto sculpted reliefs of paper, plaster, and bandage, then rephotographed the distortions. Much of the source material came from his father, Thomas Ellis, a photographer killed by police in 1958, two months before Darrel was born. The son built a future from the images of a past he never lived, inventing a family album that admits both grief and imagination.
Ellis spent time at PS1 at the turn of the eighties and worked as a guard at MoMA, as Angus did in those same years. Two artists watching over the museum while making their own work in the off hours. That detail stays with me: how often do we look past the guard who might be an artist whose work will matter to us all in thirty years? Ellis’s recognition has grown in recent years, thanks to the care of his friend Allen Frame and to the persistence of those who refused to let his images disappear. His art reminds us that every archive is also an act of resurrection.
People will call A Visual Diary a lecture performance, and it is that, but the definition feels too dry. In practice, Fabio is hosting a gathering. He is less lecturer than custodian. He is careful with the images and with the songs. He knows that the material is not neutral and treats it as if it were on loan from the living. That attention shapes the audience too. You feel invited rather than taught, responsible rather than entertained.
There is a reason the turntable matters. A song can collapse time in a way an image cannot. Place the needle and you feel the air of a different room. Fabio uses music like a hinge between years, from disco to classical to love songs. The selections are dramaturgy, not decoration. They let the images exhale. They teach the audience how to breathe with the story rather than observe it from a distance.
As someone who lives and works with photography, what moved me deeply is how central the visual language is to this performance. The photographs and videos are not supporting elements; they are its bloodstream. Fabio moves through them with the instinct of someone who knows that images are alive only when placed in relation to one another. The sequencing, the dissolves, the rhythm of projection all recall the emotional power of the slideshow, that fragile form where photography and music meet to create something larger than either. It reminded me how an image, when seen in motion and in community, stops being static and becomes a shared experience.
The piece never scolds, yet it is political. It exposes how easily the art world overlooks what does not fit its fashion of the moment. It shows how much of the cultural record survives thanks to a few people who refused to let things vanish. It honors those who kept the archives on kitchen tables and under beds, and the artists who built small sanctuaries where they could be themselves when the world outside was hostile.
I found myself grateful to the custodians. To Betty, who learned to hang her son’s paintings on clean white walls only after she was free to do so. To Arthur, who loved Larry and kept his drawings safe until the world remembered to look again. To Allen, who made sure Darrel’s photographs kept thinking. And to Fabio, who refuses to let any of this remain private grief. He turns it into public care.
When the lights rose, I felt that rare sensation that art has done what it is meant to do: make us more porous, more attentive, more human. It transformed remembrance into a collective act. It asked us not only to look but to hold what we had seen.
A Visual Diary is not nostalgia. Nostalgia wants the past to stay golden and far away. Fabio invites it into the present and asks us to take responsibility for it. Archives are not objects. They are relationships. They live when someone carries them forward. Triennale presented the work in the historic CRT venue, and that setting mattered. It gave space back to tenderness, music, and memory. For a moment, the community that once existed only in fragments was whole again.
Leaving the theatre, I thought: perhaps this is what art is for, to keep love from dissolving into silence, to keep memory alive long enough to become our own.
A VISUAL DIARY
Next performances:
ERT Bologna, 3–7 December 2025
