There is a poetics of the body that crosses the history of the representation of the human figure. A poetics that never ceases to transform itself over history, in sociological, anthropological and political backgrounds of diverse cultures. And there is a gender language that goes along with making and discarding identity and sense of self as a woman, as a man, as someone else, or as a whole. In his most recent works, Pacifico Silano still pursues his glance on the male body, this time exploring themes of desire and sexuality through personal iconographical research that highlights the persistence of certain male archetypes through popular virile icons in 70s an 80s American visual culture, where gender studies were theorized back then.

Referring to the twenty years of opposition between conservatism and LGBTQ rights activism and weaving through the complexity of a period of transgressions and conquests, repression and freedom, Silano investigates American images and myths conveyed by gay porn magazines circulated in the 1970s and 1980s – including Blueboy, active from 1974 to 2007, or Honcho: The Magazine for the Macho Male, published from 1979 to 1996.
If the gay press was the pivot of the American counterculture in the public sphere, the pornographic magazines circulating at that time still reflected the paradoxes of a period heavily dominated by Hollywood cinema models and famous depictions connoted by attributes of maleness which have roots in the exercise of violence or physical dominance, as in the camaraderie of the Western white man. Images, patterns and habits that still can act on spectators’ point of view. Vigor and physical strength, leadership and authoritarianism are features that defined masculinity in the 1970s and previous decades. In the portraits of men in the guise of cowboys, policemen, workers, wrestlers, motorcyclists or bodybuilders, recurring as in movies as in magazines of the time, Silano identifies virile icons which have crowded the American mass communication and culture, suggesting a diachronic perspective of Western masculinity representation. Thus, In the work Untitled (Wrestlers) a guy wearing the American flag on his costume, caught in the effort to free himself from the opponent’s grip, doesn’t differ too much from the Greek giants fighting carved on the altar of Pergamon; in the work Bronco, a half-naked cowboy with its gun folded and stirrups laid down, echoes the weary and sculptural vigor of the Farnese Hercules. Strong men, heroes in the exuberance of their body. As a man, Silano challenges this gender rhetoric, unmasking the ancient cult of manhood and effectively resizing and blurring its boundaries.

The source material of the works on display is the result of the selection and cutting of photographs published in magazines, which the artist later rephotographed. Sometimes Silano focuses on just a few details, other times by cutting and framing choices, he interrupts the formal composition of the images creating voids and fractures. The result is a zone of ambiguity and complexity which undermines the voyeurism from which erotic photography itself feeds. Thus, ambivalence and lacunae become visual paradigms capable of seducing, disrupting and complicating the very perception of the male body, sex and sexuality, and allow the artist to reshape an idea of manhood which still leaves its mark in contemporary society. Already in the 1940’s Theodor W. Adorno, while in exile in the United States, in the fragment Though Baby – later published in the volume Minima Moralia (1951) – wrote that the construction of traditional masculinity and the image of the strong man was built on physical fatigue, strength, the smell of whiskey, cigars and leather, nearly as symptoms of what he called latent violence, endorsed, amongst others, by the Hollywood film industry. Details that, like objects or stage quality, have contributed to the making of iconic characters and attributes that the artist reports in his own photographic re-compositions. Reformatted, decomposed, enlarged until they reveal the texture of the paper printed fifty years ago, the images Silano appropriates have now reframed and returned to the viewers’ gaze through the artist’s discreet lens: as if the body, at first overexposed, could be only perceived at las, as if a gesture of love were left to the intimacy and ambiguity of a half-open door. Silano’s new work proposes a fragmented mythology of manhood, creating a special visual archive yet to be questioned in the gaps between present and past, and fostering new reflections on issues such as gender and identity conceived in their relational dimension and cultural and historical relativity. Browsing through the pictures, going from the 70s magazines to Silano’s works, the aggressive grammar of virility acquires new declensions: abstracting and transforming the modern erotic effigies into unfinished figures with cut-off faces, the artist gives way to soft sensuality, to interrupted or denied touch. No longer ambassadors of a consummate idea of man, these “broken” icons find a place in the artwork to finally put down their weapons. With the exhibition Sweetest Kill, Pacifico Silano uses his poetic gaze to contemplate the push and pull between desire and violence.