S&M (saints and martyrs)

I

Saints & Martyrs is a photo series on feverishly erotic, spiritual ecstasies.

Each image is staged with painted sculptures that, after being photographed, are destroyed. The work is hybrid, intermedia - queer in content and form (‘Purity is a Myth,’ proclaimed Hélio Oiticica). From the erudite to the vernacular, from catholic saints to experimental queer art, from crafty to operatic.

II

Art History is a collection of photographs (in books, PowerPoints, online). They refer but are thought a poor substitute. Like porn to sex. I make photographs without (standing) referents. The situations exist to be recorded by the mechanical eye. This is misbehaved photography, far from its specificity and orthodoxies. The photographs that comprise the history of art are supposed to be transparent windows and

placeholders for the actual (future) experience. Here, this is it, the actual experience.

III

An lgbt+ person who visits a historical art museum is forced to be a detective, a decoder. She tries to read the repressed. She engages in secret handshakes with the artworks. Or else she doubts her reading as projection. Or else she reinvents the works at her own image. Then a circuitous history is formed, a history of whispers and chuckles and secret: a history of cruising artworks looking for connections.

IV

The work also reflects my upbringing in Brasil, the biggest catholic country in the world. Saint Sebastian, for example, is the (official) patron saint of Rio, and also the (unofficial) patron saint of lgbt+ people. This cultural environment is an important part of my interest in the body. As Heartney argues, Catholicism’s sensibility was important in the works of many artists who are/were interested in the body – many of which, as it happens, are/were queer - such as Robert Gober, Serrano, Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Kahlo, etc.

V

An un-modernist photography that is promiscuous, overflowed.