One of the major problems Webb encountered in his quest for homosexual imagery was how to formulate a convincing figure type. His blend of ironic wit and heroic grandeur demanded a male figure that was vulnerably human yet still defined or marked by a powerful, driving sexuality. The challenge was to come up with a physiognomy that, as Webb puts it, “wasn’t like a Ken doll.” The solution lay in Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello frescoes in Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice, which Webb first saw in 1989.

Punchinello, a well known figure from the Commedia dell’Arte, first appeared on the Italian stage sometime in the 17th century as a servant of the hero and heroine whose frustrated courtship formed the basic plot of most productions. Like other stock characters of the improvised theater, Punchinello was masked....Punchinello’s absurd physical presence introduces a subversive, foolish note to momentous events as well as trivial activities like sawing wood or watching a dog dance. But his clownish naivete and unabashed enthusiasm lend a tragic-comic poignancy to the mundane rhythms and rituals of everyday human existence. Punchinello remains the star of his own life-- humble as it is--and endows his time on earth with a kind of heroism.

The Italian clown, with his phallic nose and dunce cap, attracted Webb instantly. He describes him as “a little like Woody Allen, a bit of a buffoon. He was particular, but also general. He could be repeated. In Punchinello, I found an Everyman who in my paintings is Everygayman”.

--from Punchinello Paintings catalog essay, 1992
by Nancy Grimes, art critic and painter

[Webb’s] friend through all his trials--personal and professional--has been Punchinello, that odd comic/tragic character of the Commedia dell’Arte. Previously, Punchinello had made his most famous appearance in an extraordinary series of drawings by Domenico Tiepolo. Domenico turned to this figure of traveling farces and puppet shows at the end of the eighteenth century, when Italian painting seemed in final decline. Transferring the masked figure with the big nose from the the carnival to everyday situations was a way to critique contemporary mores. But it also gave Domenico an original voice separate from his famous father Giambattista. If Domenico’s Punchinello drawings often parody his father’s work and the culture from which it sprung, it is not to negate his tradition , but to try to find a way for it to go on. Webb confronts a fin de siecle art world that even more that Domenico’s seems exhausted ....

-- from Punchinello Works Out catalog essay, 1998
Jonathan Weinberg, art historian and painter

I first came across the humorous and deadly serious figure of Punchinello in 1989 at the Ca' Rezzonico in Venice in the frescoes and drawings of G.D. Tiepolo. I was immediately attracted to Punchinello. His phallic red nose and white hat struck me with their sexual provocativeness. His mask not only disguised him but marked him as an outsider. I realized that Punchinello, the trickster or fool from the Italian theatrical tradition of the Commedia dell'Arte could become the protagonist for my contemporary narratives.

My version of Punchinello is distinctly different from that found in the Commedia dell'Arte--slimmer without hump, driven by his sexual appetite and search for self, Punchinello is I and not I. He is my friends and lovers and not. The idea of form parallels the idea of narrative; both are products of a combination of specific personal memory and larger structural, symbolic, and metaphorical considerations. Punchinello continues to engage me. He resists definition. He disrupts expectation. He forces the viewer away from a purely abstract or formal interpretation of painting and into a fictive world of complex narratives and multiple identities. He is a ridiculous clown taken from a distant culture and reinvented to speak for me now.

--from James White Review , Vol. 16, No. 1 Winter 1999 Patrick Webb

Patrick Webb's narrative paintings, inspired by the plague that has devastated his generation, are brilliant and mordant evocations of a twentieth-century Carnival of Death. Others have broached the subject of AIDS with varying degrees of rage and despair. Webb's conception of the doomed protagonist as a figure adapted from Tiepolo's clownish Punchinello enables him to confront the terrible with an irony that enriches and deepens the ultimate pathos. I am moved by these paintings and admire them for their invention, craft, and complex psychic texture.

---Stanley Kunitz writes of the early (1993) Punchinello paintings:

Carnivalistic laughter likewise is directed toward something higher--toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders. Laughter embraces both poles of change, it deals with the very process of change, with crisis itself. Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation ... and affirmation.... This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world. Such is the specific quality of ambivalent carnival laughter.

--from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
Mikhail Bakhtin