STRUNG
SEBASTIAN
TOP
BONJOUR
NAMLESS CUTS
A BRIEF SWIM
STRIPS STRAPS
BOTTOM
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BONJOUR
Ever since I worked and lived in Paris (2013-2015) I have been gathering small free commercial booklets (city plans of queer quarters with advertisements, underwear collection brochures, underwear calenders). In a certain way, fragments of nudity - covered nudity - has always triggered me sensually in my gay feelings. I am not the striking gay man. I am the concealment of my sexuality. It's not a choice.
During a two year relationship with Gill (2016-2018) I started using the paper booklets, cutting pieces out of it that triggered me, and putting them together in compositions. This was top secret desk work. Gill couldn't know about it. This was my fantasy outside of him.
Gill started to go out in the weekends more and more, came back too late or not at all. What was he doing all night long, maybe looking or touching other guys, maybe caressing their skin intimately - different skin color, maybe muscular - in a club or in an alley? How can he shift so easily between guys without any feelings towards them, cutting off any form of intimacy for himself?
This situation started to question - I was so in love - my sexuality and what I really like in a man. The essential question that I could derive out of it was: why do I like man meat? Only taking into account what is visible - no feelings - to the eyes. As a reaction to this I started making secret collages of cuts - Nameless Cuts - to investigate my sexual excitement in reflection to the pieces.
No male glance is allowed to participate as this interrupts the sensation. In addition to touch and feel, important coverings - underwear, tanktops , etc - find their way into the presentation. I categorize them as second skin - the extension of his sensation - playing together. Do you see the skin or do you still see their identity? Where is your personal boundary? What is very masculine? Where does feminine begin? Does depth in the imaging and abstraction create a mix of the two, can they even be mixed, stripping away their identity?
In my recent research I put this chunk in relation to nature. Have I not gone too far away from the essence, beautiful handsome masculinity? I put it against water and stone, the most fluid and the most persistent natural material on earth, that we touch daily. Does my vision still stand up in this ordeal? Do they come closer or do they move apart? What movement do they make together?
TORSO AS PORTRAIT
Noun: 'part of a body without a head'
Removing his or her identity. Which parts of the body make somebody a personality? Dissecting someone's 'being', investigating what they are made of.
Image without limbs. Incoherent, coherent muscle bundles. Its skin that always reflects or absorbs light differently.
CUTTING MALE EDGE
The cutting edge makes it tangible, graspable. The making process remains visible. It's feels the same way when cutting in wood veneer, an art in itself, a natural material close to nature.
Cutting in 'male skin'-prints is a specific action. This action is for me the important common thread in building a composition. This phase is where decisions are made, desires are found, based on the piece of skin, the timbre in skin color, and the structure of the skin.
Based on that, I draw straight cutting lines to arrive at smaller fragments of the global image, like classical wood veneer works are composed. Searching for the right woodpatterns, fragmenting, leaving out to give the isolated part new meaning, generating something else. Ultimately, it is our eye and brain that gives a new meaning to one small fragment, and therefore to the total image of many small fragments together.
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