ABOUT ME

David Disparos, a Spanish video maker and photographer, also celebrates the body, but this time in its masculine form. His naked and proud models probe the lens that snaps away at them and their muscles make light of the colours and architecture surrounding them. Whilst shards of light are crafted using mirrors reflecting the blazing sun in Spain, each pose, gaze or raw intention emanates from the model.

Since 2004, David Disparos has been exploring the arrogant bodies of fleeting encounters. These photographs, which are both an aesthetic and therapeutic act, are the result of a languorously drawn-out process, a seductive ballet and three-way dance between the subject, photographer and his camera.

David willingly confesses that he is attracted to models boasting bestial, over-developed masculinity in keeping with the stereotypes of heterosexual virility. Whilst at the time and according to the art of Tom of Finland, depictions of muchly macho pectorals were vectors of emancipation for the members of the gay community, today they seem more like typecasting that needs to be questioned. Such calling into question is apparent here through the cheeky pleasure that the artist takes in revealing and taming the contradictions of this loudmouthed virility. Into these mechanisms of desire, of which we only glimpse a few fragments, David digs deep, to describe them, in the words of Almodovar from the monologue in All About My Mother: “Me llaman la Agrado”; the call me the pleasant one. For it is a genuine undertaking of charm and trust required to get these men to embody both the subject and object of the photograph by themselves, to help them “feel beautiful”, to seek to thrill the gaze of whomsoever contemplates them.