Inventing the Nonexistent: From Erasure to Queer Empowerment in Visual Culture
To fill the silences imposed by heteronormative oppression, I draw on the visual heritage that has been passed down and imagine the works that history never allowed to come into being. The in-depth version of what expresses my vision as an artist and art thinker is presented here. On my website, it appears in a slightly different form, under the heading “My Vision.”
Homage and Reappropriation: Queer Counterpoints to Tradition
At the heart of my artistic practice lies the questioning of a man — artist and art historian — whose desire, shaped by homosexuality, traverses with fluidity the many facets of masculine eroticism.
After a lifetime of artistic practice, I asked myself: what if heteronormative oppression had not weighed upon us for millennia? What if our desires and pleasures had been free to find expression through artistic media? What works, now absent from museum walls, might have existed? My work seeks to answer this question: a utopian exploration of what the history of art could have been.
In the face of backlash against the gains and hopes carried by recent decades, I interrogate the active role I might play in this new chapter of defending and advancing queerness. How can I transmit a message that preserves this memory, resists a renewed historical erasure, and offers future generations a vision in which our narratives and identities assert themselves without compromise?
Toward an Emancipated Museum: Art, Body, and Freedom Without Concessions
I seek to contribute to the creation of an imaginary museum, emancipated from historically heteronormative constraints — a space where my worlds of fantasy may be expressed freely, a place that appears to follow the codes of the past while subverting its rules, where ancient art might be liberated from the restrictive norms that weighed upon it across centuries. The visual world I construct proposes an unencumbered vision of sexuality: a sexuality respectful of the other and freely consented, consciously diverging from reductive and moralizing models that, in the end, oppress all individuals. It is a space where the body and its desires can be represented freely, in restored dignity and splendor, far from shame and repression.
Far from criticizing the work of past artists or diminishing the importance of the “surviving” works, this project proposes counter-readings that redirect attention toward the creations that never came into being—not for lack of talented artists who might have brought them forth, but because of an oppression that prevented their emergence. My intervention thus acts as a revealer: it illuminates what had been concealed or withdrawn from collective memory. For every work bearing homoerotic codes that has survived, a hundred others have vanished, depriving the visual heritage of an immeasurable richness.
To subvert this established order is to break with systems that perpetuate shame around the body, its nudity, and its sexuality. It is a call for an art in which freedom and inclusivity redefine what museum walls ought to present, inviting us to reconsider the relationship between art and the society that defines it.
Through my principal practice, I already seek to instill a form of sensual pleasure, an intimacy in which the gay man may recognize and flourish. Yet as these aims can lend themselves to humor, I often stray from the solemn tone of the cultural sphere: sometimes inserting hidden winks, sometimes inventing a gay fantasy universe, at once intimate and playful.
Chimeras and Reinvention: AI in the Service of Queer Empowerment
In my artistic process, I sometimes turn to artificial intelligence, for I value this tool that plumbs the unconscious of the internet’s memory. It functions as a “generative subconscious,” producing raw, fragmented images that arise like dreams or symptoms — visual witnesses to what culture has repressed. These automatic visions are chimeras: altered fragments of reality, oneiric distortions, fertile absurdities. They partake of what Freud described as the work of dreams: condensation, displacement, traces of repressed desires that find unexpected release in the image. I regard them as material to be shaped, where suppressed visual imaginaries erupt in splintered form.
This dynamic converges with the Surrealist intuition, which sought to give shape to unconscious productions. My role as artist is to select, divert, and recompose these visions, to embrace even their aberrations so as to confer new meaning. It is here that the boundary is drawn between generative automatism and creative act. From these sketches, I intervene pictorially: collages, superimpositions, added textures, modulation of color. The initial image is transformed and inscribed within a hybrid visual tradition — between classical inheritance and digital exploration. The finished work bears the trace of this dialogue: my creative desire, the impulse of the prompt, the generative contingency of AI, and above all the pictorial decision that redirects and transcends the raw material.
Through this process I am able to explore a queer and fantastical imaginary, reactivating images long censored or forbidden. I thereby effect a reappropriation of representations, a symbolic repair that finally accords space to those whose gestures of affection, embraces, and desires had been banished from the collective visual field.
Redefining Virility: An Ode to the Male Body Diverting Oppressive Violence
My work is marked by a refusal of the glorification of military and heroic bravery — whose primary aim is to ennoble the intrinsic brutality of human nature, so as to harness it for conquest and domination. I condemn its oppressive uses, even as I borrow its codes in order to subvert them.
This critique goes beyond a mere rejection of violence: it turns away from the brute heroized in domination, while retaining certain codes as material for play and reinvention. It is not a matter of denying strength or musculature, but of distinguishing them from any exercise of power not freely consented to—within a dynamic that is playful, voluntary, and reversible. The work thus proposes an ode to the male body, affirmed yet stripped of all posture of superiority, where heightened muscularity expresses both the force of the figure and of the critical project itself, while also engaging the aesthetic canons of our time. Mobilizing these codes enables a mise en abyme that directly addresses the beholder and reinscribes homoeroticism into the history of the visual.
The stakes go further still. Rather than encounter each other in conflicts driven by hatred or the thirst for power, male bodies here embrace, unite in gestures of love. Masculinity is presented in a way that legitimizes homosexuality and depicts it explicitly and affirmatively, leading to a deconstruction of aggression through the reversal of traditional themes. If there is struggle, it is in the form of jousting; if there is combat, it is in an embrace; if there are clashes, it is in the mounting of intercourse.
Thus, in my works, homosexual embraces and symbols of masculinity are asserted without ambiguity, casting new light on representations of virility — far removed from the colonizing violence once glorified, of both territories and bodies, and from the unequal myth of the triumphant male hero.
My Struggle: Responsibility, Cooperation, and Commitment
As artist and art historian, I see myself above all as a transmitter of culture, a relay between epochs, bearing the responsibility of a militant contribution to our own.
At the core of my practice lies the conviction that cooperation is no less essential than competition in the creation and transmission of life. The responsibility I feel goes hand in hand with a necessary humility: I cannot alone take on every struggle faced by minority communities persecuted on the basis of sex, gender, or freely consented sexual practices. The battles are many, in the face of ideologies urging women back into traditional roles and 2SLGBTQ+ communities into invisibility — or worse, annihilation.
It is by recognizing the fields of engagement specific to each individual that I choose to focus on what I can offer through my own experience, leaving to others the task of carrying their own struggles and representing their unique realities, while positioning myself as an unconditional ally.
