About these cutouts:
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These cutouts begin, quite literally, with a hole. A figure—a man drawn from pre-AIDS pornography—is carefully excised from the paper, leaving behind an absence shaped like desire. The body is not layered on top, as in conventional collage, but removed, then reinserted into itself. This is not montage; it is a ritual of subtraction. The hole comes first.

Each gesture of cutting is a kind of repetition—precise, almost compulsive. The body is disassembled and recomposed, not to restore meaning but to approach its limit. These compositions enact a strange logic: one in which pleasure is found not in fulfilment but in circling around a void. They invite the viewer into a visual economy of loss, where looking becomes bound to a desire that cannot be satisfied, only rehearsed.

These are not bodies so much as voids where bodies used to be—forms made of lack, images sculpted from disappearance. They echo a very particular impulse: not the wish to be seen, but the pull towards erasure. A kind of jouissance creeps in—not in orgasm, but in dissolution. The fantasy here is not of self-realisation, but of vanishing. To be used, consumed, and unmade. To no longer be the subject of one’s own life, but a surface onto which others project.

The hole, then, becomes more than a compositional device. It is the engine of the work, the visual echo of a deeper drive—a compulsion not toward life, but toward a kind of exquisite undoing. These cutouts inhabit the space between repetition and disappearance. They suggest that beneath every act of looking lies a desire to reach the point where looking fails, where meaning collapses into sensation, and where the image itself seems to stare back, emptied and flat.

And yet, the hole is never truly empty. It holds a charge, an invitation. It is the place where history and fantasy meet, where the pleasures of the past brush against the viewer’s own projections. These works do not mourn the bodies they depict; they allow them to drift, fragment, repeat. They preserve a certain truth: that to be reduced to a hole is not always to be diminished. It is, paradoxically, to take up space in another way.

The result is a kind of choreography of absence. The cutouts do not offer resolution. They orbit their own voids, invoking a pleasure that insists on returning to its origin, knowing it will never arrive. In this, they mirror a broader human tension: the wish to dissolve and the need to be seen.