1.
Saints & Martyrs is a series of photographs of painted sculptures of languid men. The sculptures are destroyed after being shot. The work is hybrid, genre fluid, queer in content and form (‘purity is a myth,’ proclaimed Hélio Oiticica).
2.
Photography is a drawer of dead-loved leftovers. But we throw away the keys. that is the deal. Here photography is an arena. Things happen for it, at it. The sculptures and paintings, shot and discarded: the saloon was a façade, the dead cowboy. The presentness of the 3D into the suspended past of images.
3.
Those are languid men. They are odalisques and nymphs and goddesses, ready for the taking. They are saints who give their body and life to the beloved, big brother and father. Those men are in control in their erotic abandon. Here is my body, it is yours, take it, do with it what you will - please (me).
4.
All Art History survey books are books of photographs. Photographs engaged as transparent windows and also as placeholders for the ‘real experience.’ Like porn to sex. Photos that are anonymous artworks, invisible in their profusion, blamed for the degradation of the aura of the originals. And yet it is often through them that we fall in love with works of art in painting and sculpture. We fell in love with photographs pretending to be paintings.
5.
Informed by Brazilian bodies of trance. Saints from Candomblé who mount, penetrate the body, who possess the lover. Saints in Christian churches, which readily give their bodies to the unseen male just outside the frame (Him) with lustmord. Becoming for love.
