Pacifico Silano

Solo Show curated by Monti8 Gallery, Latina Italy

When I Am Empty is a group exhibition featuring the work of seven artists who explore the dominant myths of the American dream that govern and shape our personal narratives. BRIC, Brooklyn, NY.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce PACIFICO SILANO: Men Play Games, an exhibition of new and recent photographic works on view from July 23 through September 3, 2022. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 23rd, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm.

Pacifico Silano is known for sourcing archival images of gay pornography, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, to interrogate white masculinity and American clichés through the lens of queer desire. He creates his work by photographing, rather than scanning, the archival photographs he has collected. Silano often layers them physically on top of each other, sometimes repeating the process with several magazines, and then takes a picture of the final layout. He makes further edits to those images by cropping or scaling them to show the pixelated grain, paper fibers, rough edges, or a detail of the magazine spine.

The bodybuilder, policeman, soldier, sailor, and other overtly male archetypes featured in his work depict playfully performed seduction when considered in their original form as magazine pages, yet the longer one views Silano’s constructions the more complicated and fraught these images become. Silano lures the viewer’s gaze by using what is in the frame, but also importantly, what lies beyond the frame – that which goes unnoticed but is also implied. His juxtaposition of images reveals the power and violence latent in the original source material.

The works stand on a knife’s edge, as many of the appropriated images involve scenarios that appear on the cusp of danger and hint at violence bubbling to the surface. He uses presentation – images on delicate ovals like locket keepsakes, or printed on draped silk – enlarged scale, and fragmentation of the male body as part of a strategy to undermine hypermasculine archetypes. More than mere appropriation, Silano works to recontextualize these original images and to explore the attraction of queer masculinity, its dangers, and its limits.

MONTI8 is excited to announce Don't Worry Baby, first solo show of Pacifico Silano at the gallery.

After exhibiting in 2020 in the gallery opening exhibition Out of the Folds, the artist now presents a new body of ten works which start a new direction in his survey. This new series, entirely made for the show, revolves around the balance between softness and aggression – as the artists sais - , a balance that is underlined by the contrast between the use of quiet colors and darker tones.

As in the whole Silano's practice, the works are created using images from old gay erotica magazines, selecting, cutting and overlapping images to create new narratives, where nothing is expicit, like sexual acts or nudity. The sexuality of the subjects is only evoked by a detail of a body, an expression or a movement of a hand.

Every work is marked by a strong sense of intimacy. In Morning Ritual, for example, there is a man caught in a private moment: he's naked in his bathroom, shaving, grabbing a green soft towel, a simple gesture that every man does, Nevertheless, despite this trivial action of the everyday life, this image reveals a subtle but deep sensuality, enhanced by the mirror on the left which seems on the verge of disclosing something more private.

If in Morning Ritual sensuality is slightly revealed, in the diptych Leather Man is more obvious. The dark tones highlight the masculinity of the bodies: on the left, only a black leather belt dresses the naked white skin of someone's back. Especially in the second image, the masculinity is even stronger and is suggested by the dark leather clothes, like the belt and the jacket, which intensify a perception of violence. Violence is a fundamental aspect in Pacifico Silano's new series. Through these images, he investigates the violence that exists under the surface of the images and speaks to the current moment - as Silano declares.

The works thought for the show are less focused on loss and absence, two issues prominent in the previous ones, they are instead more critical and centred on the contemporary society events, in particular related to American white men.

In some subjects the masculinity is hinted in a more elegant way, like in the work Body Talk, where the softness of the white towel on the floor mitigates the virility of the scene,or Saturday Night In, which captures a moment of sweetness and tenderness.

The show invites the viewer to reflect on some issues became central in the today's society. However, Silano speaks of the present drawing from the past: through his process and the use of old magazines he brings back to life something almost forgotten today, like printed magazines and old images culture of the past decades.

Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (Like They Used To) presents a series of large-scale, photo-based installations from lens-based artist, Pacifico Silano, whose ongoing practice explores imagery sourced from vintage gay pornography magazines published after the Stonewall Riots of 1969. As an artist born during the height of the AIDS epidemic in New York, Silano’s practice is keenly attuned to the sense of loss and invisibility felt by many in the gay community during the 1980s. As a child, he lost his uncle due to complications from HIV AIDS and witnessed his family’s subsequent erasure of any visual record of his life. While his biography figures prominently into the initial impulse behind his archival interventions and source material, this work extends far beyond the personal, diving deeply into the slipperiness of the medium of photography and the mutability of its meaning over time. Through cutting and layering, Silano obscures the explicit nature of the original imagery, instead presenting us with quiet, tender moments of reflection that become at once memorials for those who have passed as well as points of reflection on our current moment.

—Ashlyn Davis Burns, exhibition curator

American conceptual artist Pacifico Silano’s practice is rooted in excavating the printed ephemera of gay culture to create new images that comment on loss, longing and queer melancholy. In particular, Silano uses the gestures of framing, cropping and layering vintage gay erotica to comment on the HIV/AIDS crisis and its reverberations on queer lives, which included the loss of the artist's uncle at the height of the epidemic.

I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine is Silano’s first artist’s book, and engages with an ambitious accordion-folded format that references Silano’s photo-based installations: two twenty-panel long sequences that can be read as both one continuous collage and a sequence of individual images. Included in the book is an interview with the artist by José Diaz, Chief Curator of The Andy Warhol Museum.

A four-colour risograph poster edition to accompany the release of this artist book is also available.

Pre Order Book Here

Installation shots from Melanie Flood Projects.

Curated by Yaelle S. Amir.

In I Won’t Last A Day Without You, Pacifico Silano presents new work from his ongoing series of photo collages that draw from gay erotica magazines published after the Stonewall riots (1969) and through the height of the AIDS epidemic (late 1980s). Layering snippets of desert views with forest flora, tulle with roses, a face, an arm, a shadow—these fragments serve to soften the outlandish performative aspects of male desire commonly found in their source material, and offer instead a tender, quiet and fragile expression of masculinity. The resulting works communicate poetic moments that are embedded with a deep sense of melancholy reflective of the era from which the images were derived. Rather than fantasy and satisfaction, the onlooker now contends with feelings of emptiness and sorrow.

The purpose and materiality of Silano’s work stems from a highly personal position. Born during the peak of the AIDS crisis to a family who ran an adult novelty store, Silano lost his uncle due to complications from HIV. Yet the shame associated with his uncle’s sexuality and the stigma surrounding the disease led to his family’s erasure of his memory. With that experience serving as a catalyst, Silano has created these works as stand-in memorials for the individuals depicted upon the pages of the sourced magazines, as well as for those who consumed their image. As contemporary interpretations of archival materials, the works candidly hold within them the past and future—demonstrating acutely how a photograph can evolve its meaning and context as culture gains new understanding of history.

–Yaelle Amir, Exhibition curator

Installation at The Eye Sees

Arles, France.

2020

Exhibition install at Light Work’s Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery.

Syracuse, NY

2020

Exhibition install at The Bronx Museum’s Block Gallery,

New York, NY

2019

Pacifico Silano: Speaking Little, Perhaps Not a Word borrows its title from the final verse of Walt Whitman’s short poem, “A Glimpse,” a rumination on the quiet spaces where intimacy, memory, and longing reside amidst the spirited volumes of everyday life. Equally meditative, Silano's body of work presented in Speaking Little, Perhaps Not a Word recombines imagery drawn from gay erotica, vintage advertisements, and queer archival media to explore the vestiges of loss, desire, and melancholy that continue to reverberate across the LGBTQ community owing to the 1980s AIDS crisis. The death of the artist's uncle due to complications of HIV and subsequent family erasure have been the catalyst for his ongoing work around these themes. Pacifico Silano: Speaking Little, Perhaps Not a Word is the artist's first solo exhibition with the Bronx Museum and is presented alongside the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Exhibition install at Stellar Projects

Curated by Nathan Storey,

New York, NY

2018

For After Silence, Pacifico Silano presents a series of photographs, which evoke the emotional and physical voids felt as a result of the AIDS epidemic.

Through fragmenting, obscuring, layering, reassembling, and re-photographing, Silano re-contextualizes gay erotica from the 1970’s pre-AIDS era, such as the Richard Marshall Collection of Gay Pornography at NYU’s Fales Library. The images found within the Disco-era magazines such as Blueboy, Honcho, and Drummer, are saturated with innocence and naiveté; euphoric colors; and an aura of total liberation. Today, we access this archive with the knowledge of the devastation experienced by this community and an entire generation. 

After Silence considers complex issues and quiet meditations on queer ephemera, identity, and our evolving relationship to the archive.

2018

2017

2016

2013

In Pages of a Blueboy Magazine, Pacifico Silano has cropped and removed the overtly sexual details of one hundred male centerfolds. The remaining gazes of the male models allow the viewer to contemplate the mortality of the men depicted and of the images’ original consumers.

2013