Pacifico Silano
Close-up

Exhibition Details

Pacifico Silano photographs fragments of gay pornographic magazines from the 1970s–1980s. In an era connecting the legacy of sexual revolutions with the HIV/AIDS crisis, magazines were spaces of community and resistance. For Silano, they are today reservoirs of new possible images: by magnifying elements and isolating details, the narrative potential of each page seems impossible to exhaust.

Tenderness, eroticism and romance are shadowed by melancholy and erasure. A sense of belonging and liberation merges with loss due to the history of HIV/AIDS, which had Silano’s uncle as one of its victims. The images on show appear simple on their surface, but hide layers of meaning underneath. Silano describes them as “Trojan horses”: objects of desire that become more ambiguous as one observes them. There is an obsession with uniforms, with mirrors and their reflections. Masculinity, violence, stereotypes and narcissism are in constant tension.

Printed on fabric, floating and out of scale, key images from his production take on materiality. We observe them as objects, we see the grain they are made of. The structure of the photograph is Silano’s raw material: grids of dots, but also malleable, fragile meanings that shift as their context changes. On modular wooden platforms, photographs taken on the artist’s studio floor can be moved and rearranged throughout the space. They are a window into his process, and into his relationship with a source material – the magazine archive – which is everything but finished. It is instead open to constant re-configurations, just as our gaze.