Elegy To The Void by Pacifico Silano at Ace Hotel New York

Every quarter, the Ace Artist in Residence program invites artists across the globe to turn one of their hotel rooms into the artist’s studio for a month. In May, they welcomed the last artist of the 2025 cycle – Pacifico Silano.

Overview

Pacifico Silano explores print culture, image circulation, and questions of LGBTQ identity. His work is entirely composed of repurposed fragments from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s – an era connecting the progressive legacies of sexual revolution with the advent of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis.

Rephotographing sections of the magazines, Silano assembles his new images into a range of seductive installations, which often reference the materiality of the publications themselves—honing in on stapled centerfolds, torn sheets, or the faded color palette of printed pages weathered through time. Bringing contrasting details to the fore, from the familiar visual signifiers of an archetypal masculinity, to more romantic glimpses of an overlooked tenderness, Silano points to the tensions that underlie his source material; between harshness and softness, between joy and melancholy, between the liberation of gay communities and their enduring adherence to wider social norms.