“I don’t take pictures from real life, because I believe everything that I want to say has been said already. I’m just finding new ways to translate it.”

~Pacifico Silano

Pacifico Silano describes himself as a ‘lens-based artist,’ not as a photographer. While this may seem like a somewhat superfluous label, it has its merits. As he has pointed out, Silano does not take any of the photographs that he publishes — rather, his artistic practice is rooted in cutting, collaging, layering, and arranging various images from printed media. What results is far from a mere reiteration of these photographic ephemera; instead, we are presented with a wholly original exposition of the themes contained in these pictures.

In his latest book, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, Silano employs his signature practice to comment on the way the HIV/AIDS crisis impacted the lives of countless queer individuals, including himself. The book, which uses a unique accordion-like format in which two twenty-panel sequences are printed back-to-back, opens with a conversation between Silano and José Diaz, Chief Curator of the Andy Warhol Museum. Here, Silano explains how the death of his uncle in the midst of the AIDS crisis gave him a first-hand look at what it means to have one’s identity erased.

The themes of identity and loss are made apparent through Silano’s prolific use of collage. The book includes a number of human subjects, but in each image, a substantial portion of their bodies are cropped out and covered by another image —suggesting deletion, erasure, loss. In addition, the ideas of concealing and revealing become prevalent as metaphors for the experience of coming out. This is conveyed not only in the use of collage, but also in the book’s format itself, as the pages can be folded in a myriad of different ways, revealing or concealing whichever pages the reader likes.

Silano’s work also engages closely with the subject-object relationship in visual media, commenting on traditional ideas of objectification and desire. In none of the images is the entire body visible. Only in one is the entire face visible, and it does not seem a coincidence that this image also shows more of his nude body than any of the other images, suggesting that this person’s identity—expressed by the presentation of his entire face—is dependent on the simultaneous presentation of his nude body. In this way, the sexually objectifying nature of gay erotica, the source of these images, becomes a central topic of the book.

However, although the entire book is made up of gay erotica, Silano’s presentation of this material refuses to objectify the subject. Much of this centers around his use of the gaze. On first glance, the reader is struck by how nearly every subject makes direct eye contact with the camera. These subjects stare intensely into the viewer’s eyes with strong conviction. With this, Silano is quite clear about his intentions to uproot the typical subject-object relationship. In most visual media, and especially in pornography, we assume a unidirectional relationship between the viewer and the viewed: the former is meant to be actively looking and desiring at a passive and submissive model. But here, the subjects look back at the viewer with intention, reclaiming their agency in a potent and unsettling fashion.

Silano also provides a unique commentary on imagery in print media by emphasizing the fact that the book is printed. Anything made with a printer today is an amalgamation of microscopic dots of the three primary colors. With remarkable intention, Silano varies the size of these dots in each image in a highly unsettling way: some are crisp and clear, others are extremely pixelated. Anyone who has looked out the window of a bus or train that has its windows covered with graphics will be reminded of this uncomfortable, even painful aesthetic in several of Silano’s images. Staring closely at these pixels, the unity of the image is destroyed, and we are made hyper-aware of the fact that we are looking at an artificial representation.

A skilled conceptual artist, Silano knows how to create work whose critical potential does not cease after an initial inspection. The more the viewer engages with the book, the less stable each representation of desire, sexuality, and loss becomes. Rather than simply creating a contemporary reproduction of vintage photographic material, Silano has created a visual and conceptual interrogation of print media as a whole. All in all, a close study of I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine leaves the viewer uneasy and perhaps a little less confident in the stereotypes pervading gay culture.

I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine is published by Loose Joints.