Nudes
2025This project emerges from a critical re-engagement with Robert Mapplethorpe’s early Polaroids and nude studies, images that, in the second half of the twentieth century, asserted a radical visibility of queer bodies and embodied freedom. In contrast, today’s cultural landscape appears to be moving toward a renewed regime of bodily regulation. Despite living in an era saturated with images, the naked, particularly the queer male body, seems increasingly subject to moralisation, censorship, and algorithmic policing. We may not be imagining it: contemporary norms often demand the sanitisation of eroticism, the neutralisation of sexual markers, and the containment of desire within acceptable forms.
It is in this context that the project situates its dialogue with Grindr culture. Grindr remains a space where queer bodies circulate, self-construct, and claim visibility, yet it also mirrors the broader contradictions of our time: desire is omnipresent, but exposure is fraught; intimacy is hyper-accessible, yet increasingly regulated; the nude is ubiquitous, yet policed. The platform both inherits and transforms Mapplethorpe’s legacy, extending his exploration of the erotic body into a digital, networked ecology shaped as much by liberation as by surveillance.
The deliberate removal of the penis in my own nudes materially exposes today’s tension around nakedness: does the absence of the sexual organ make the image more acceptable, more “neutral,” more aligned with current sensibilities? Does it render the body less sexual, or merely differently legible? By erasing the most explicitly sexualised site of the male body, the work questions whether contemporary culture tolerates only a controlled, softened, desexualised form of nudity. It asks whether visibility is permitted only when the body is stripped not of clothing, but of its erotic charge.
In this sense, the project becomes both an homage to Mapplethorpe’s fearless engagement with queer corporeality and a commentary on our present moment, in which queer self-representation must once again negotiate its terms of legitimacy. It asserts that the body, desire, and pleasure remain essential forms of knowledge and existence. By foregrounding the complexities of exposure today, the work reaffirms the nude as a symbol of freedom, empowerment and resistance, an insistence on the right to inhabit one’s sensuality in a world increasingly inclined to veil, regulate, or sanitise it.
NOTE: PICTURES OF THE PROJECT ON REQUEST, ONLY FOR EXHIBITION OR PUBLICATION PURPOSES