MY WORK

My relationship with photography began in adolescence, long before it developed into a conscious artistic practice. My earliest subjects were friends, both male and female, whom I photographed according to an instinctive attraction to their physical presence.

Beauty, even then, was the principle that guided my gaze. An exception was my grandmother, whose portrait belonged to a different register of intimacy, one in which affection took precedence over aesthetic idealisation.

The Male Figure as a Central Subject

A decisive shift occurred when I was invited to exhibit at the Axel Hotel in Barcelona, my native city.

Conceived entirely around representations of the male figure, the exhibition marked the beginning of a more sustained engagement with the masculine body as the central subject of my photographic work.

A second exhibition followed, and subsequently Barcelona City Council invited me to participate in its Week of Eroticism, providing an entire floor of a municipal building for the presentation of my photographs. During this period, one critic characterised the work through the expression “sweaty bodies”, a description that revealed the extent to which images of male physicality tend to be interpreted primarily through the language of desire.

For me, however, beauty is neither a decorative attribute nor a proposition requiring justification. It is the subject of my work: a persistent aesthetic and conceptual concern through which I explore the relationship between the visible body and the emotional complexity it contains.

Although desire inevitably forms part of this territory, my interest lies equally, and perhaps more profoundly, in vulnerability, tenderness and the possibility of encountering the individual beyond the apparent perfection of his physical form.

Idealisation and Objectification

My practice operates within a deliberate tension. I am drawn to the idealised male body and to the visual conventions through which its attractiveness is constructed. At the same time, I seek to question the mechanisms of objectification that such images can reproduce. Rather than attempting to resolve this contradiction, I regard it as a productive space of inquiry. The body may initially appear as an object of contemplation, but the photographic image becomes a means of unsettling that position, suggesting alternative ways of seeing and understanding the person represented.

This approach also informs my desire to move the naked or partially clothed male figure beyond an exclusively sexualised reading. I am interested in introducing a sense of the incidental, the everyday and the intimate into images traditionally associated with erotic display.

The young man whose proportions evoke an Apollonian ideal is not merely an embodiment of physical harmony.

He is also a subject with an interior life, shaped by emotions, uncertainties and experiences that remain largely inaccessible to the viewer.

Transforming the Photographic Image

Through interventions in the photographic image, I attempt to make this tension visible. Fragmentation, displacement and the softening or disruption of contours challenge the apparent completeness of the idealised figure.

These transformations do not seek to negate beauty, but to complicate its presence, allowing the image to move between admiration and uncertainty, physical perfection and human fragility.

Classical Beauty and Contemporary Representation

My aesthetic sensibility remains deeply informed by the classical canon of beauty inherited from Greco-Roman art. I recognise that an attachment to this tradition occupies a contested position within contemporary discussions of representation and the body. Yet I consider it essential to acknowledge the particularity of my own gaze rather than to adopt a visual language that does not emerge organically from my artistic concerns.

The expansion of representation to encompass a greater diversity of bodies is an important and necessary development in contemporary art, and one that I value. My own practice, however, follows a different line of inquiry: an examination of the classical ideal from within its own visual and emotional contradictions.

Beauty as a Point of Departure

Ultimately, I am interested in what happens when the image of an apparently perfect body begins to lose its certainty. By altering its photographic presence, I seek to create a space in which beauty is no longer understood solely as an object of desire, but as a point of departure for considering vulnerability, intimacy and the complexity of being human.

A.M. 10/2026