S&M (saints & martyrs)

S&M (saints & martyrs) is an ongoing series of photographs of narrative tableaux. Its wax sculptures and gouache paintings are recycled after shot. They exist only for the lens. - The work is hybrid, genre fluid, queer in content and form.

S&M (saints & martyrs) is an ongoing series of photographs of narrative tableaux made of original sculptures and paintings. Those wax sculptures and gouache paintings are recycled after shot. They exist only for the lens.

The images show an erotics of surrender, where one gives himself completely. It is a queering of western art history, and a depiction of the physicality of love and of love as devotion. Those images cast the viewer as Him, as an object of erotic devotion, and as an invisible voyeur.

The work investigates the politics of desire and is also a reflection of experience. As it happens, in my native Rio, I lived in front of the statue of Saint Sebastian, patron saint of the city, of gay people (if unofficially), and Oxóssi for the African-Brazilian religions. His beautiful, penetrated body - in pain and ecstasy - so Carioca, so multiple. 

Growing up I saw international art mostly in photos. There was a boycott against the dictatorship and artworks did not travel to Brazil. I was fascinated by the choices that photographers made to translate sculptures, paintings, drawings; their presence gushing from those printed rectangles. The truth is that all Art History survey books are books of photographs.

S&M (saints & martyrs) does not exist in the tradition of the decisive moment, of the specificity of the medium, of straight photography (pun intended), but rather in the tradition of intimate hand made things, narrative images, of a repressed history of art.  The work is hybrid, genre fluid, queer in content and form.