A Fresh View of Queer Masculinity, Through Scraps of Old Magazines

Like other contemporary descendants of the Pictures Generation—Anne Collier, Jack Pierson, Hank Willis Thomas, Zoe Leonard—Pacifico Silano is a borrower. His pictures are based on other pictures, mostly color-saturated pages from Blueboy, Honcho, and other soft-core gay magazines from the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Although Silano’s source material is unmistakable, it’s elusive and only half seen, like a memory resurfacing or a dream slipping away. What remains is a series of overlapping fragments with an aura of paradise lost. This world, these men, died—in some cases quite literally. (Silano, who is thirty-six, has spoken of a queer uncle who died at the same age, of complications from H.I.V., and then was erased from family history.) Looking back and remembering these lost figures elicits a complicated melancholy. No wonder, then, that Silano’s work is sexy, seductive, and intensely pleasurable, yet haunted by pleasure’s limits.

Silano’s series is on exhibit at two galleries on the Lower East Side, Rubber Factory and Fragment, in a show titled “If You Gotta Hurt Somebody, Please Hurt Me” (both through May 8th). A joint press release is dense with theory speak, including a reference to Gilles Deleuze and a claim that “these new works interrogate a history of toxic masculinity fetishized by gay men.” That may well be, but the appeal of Silano’s raw material tends to undermine any attempt to weigh it down with extraneous ideas. The piece at Rubber Factory that comes closest to this “interrogation”—the truncated image of a bare-chested, shaggy-haired guy, holding a rifle like a hard-on—is more amusing than alarming, especially given the small scale at which it’s presented.

Silano’s intentions aside, his work is suffused with desire, which is exactly what the original material was designed to evoke. Flesh—a teasing flash of nakedness, never frontal nudity—raises the temperature of both shows, but Silano’s gaze is cool and appraising; he’s a connoisseur of this material, and he dissects it without breaking a sweat. One of the largest and most potent images at Rubber Factory zeroes in on the way a ribbed white T-shirt looks when tucked into worn blue jeans. We can only imagine the pictures on the next pages of whatever magazine this was torn from, and, for Silano, imagination is all. A companion image, at Fragment, crops into the photograph of a man’s chest, partly exposed under a yanked-up military-green T-shirt; a silvery dog tag suggests combat, but something a lot more intimate is in the air. That air—heated, pungent—pumps through both exhibitions, pushing against Silano’s determined restraint.

A more compact and sustained Silano experience is available in his 2021 book, “I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine” (Loose Joints), which was recently on view in an International Center of Photography exhibition titled “A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload.” At once sensational and low-key, “I Wish” (the title comes from a Ronettes song) is designed as a continuous scroll that folds like an accordion and includes images on each side. The format allows Silano to suggest the brisk rhythm of a movie montage while also slowing the viewer’s experience to a contemplative crawl. On some pages, a tear in the paper tempts the reader to run a finger down the rough seam. Other pages are dog-eared or blown up to exaggerate their grainy texture. Bodies are telegraphed as bare arms, gesturing hands, a profile, a staring eye, an armpit, a shadow, all amid swatches of landscapes and interiors.

In a conversation that introduces the book, Silano describes it as “a love letter to these images that have informed who you are.” That doesn’t mean it’s not also a critique, he quickly adds, but his fascination with the material means any misgivings are subtle, never didactic, a gentle push and pull. Silano isn’t redefining queer masculinity; he’s exploring its attractions, its dangers, and its limits. His source material might be vintage, but the issues his pictures raise are as pressing as ever.