Another one from Luigi y Luca

Italian couple LUIGI Y LUCA — the hottest new discovery of the recent months. Their art is elegant, poetic, sensitive, obsessive and exhibitionistic. It’s a perfect blend of porn and fashion, high culture and marginal kink. More power to you, sexy bitches!!! — Slava Mogutin

More at their blog and website. (And something for Karl :p)

Cupid Playing with a Butterfly
by Antoine-Denis Chaudet (1763 – 1810)
Marble, 1802-1807 | Louvre, Paris

Chaudet went to the seine river in Paris to look for a model for this masterpiece. Approaching the young nude Parisian boys swimming. There was a misunderstanding about what he wanted from a nude young boy. This landed him in jail.

The pose, the almost suave charm of the face, the delicate fingers, the refined treatment of the hair: everything expresses sensitivity, reserve, and grace. The sculptor has achieved a subtle balance between nature and the ideal, inherited from the 18th century.

Cupid is portrayed as a naked, unarmed adolescent whose sole attributes are his short wings. He seems to be engrossed in an innocent pastime. His amusement is not as harmless as it seems, though; the butterfly allowing itself to be seduced by his rose symbolizes the soul, Psyche in Greek. Imprisoned by Cupid, the soul soon experiences love’s torments rather than its pleasures. The graceful bas-relief friezes on the base develop the theme: if the butterfly tastes the juice of a basket of flowers, it is pinned down by chubby little cupids, one of whom enslaves it by harnessing it to his chariot. But the soul finally triumphs thanks to the bees: infuriated by the arrows shot at their hive, they swarm all over the cheeky imps. These scenes are inspired by the Idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BC), the most famous Greek poet of the Alexandrian era, and the delicateness of the carving expresses all their bucolic charm. [Louvre]

Working in oils, Ryan Martin composes vivid portraits and fantastical pastorals of young men and young women, often with young reptiles, young pachyderms, and young ungulates. A stylistic virtuoso, he uses smooth, groomed brushstrokes to render flora and fauna in electrified photorealistic detail while deploying broad, expressionistic flourishes of color and texture for background.

Martin’s paintings are titled after popular songs by artists such as 2Pac, Madonna, the Smiths and Led Zeppelin, and ostensibly serve as interpretations of each songs’ lyrics. At the same time, the paintings are imbued with an ineffable symbolic code, falling somewhere between the pagan and the biblical, the art-historical and the collective subconscious. Executed with a boundary pushing palette, the effect is placid yet jarring, threatening yet whimsical.

The canvases recall, in their way, the self-confidence of the late Italian Baroque: bold, lavish, dramatic, unabashedly humanistic and utterly devoid of cynicism. They remind us (thankfully) that the medium of painting will always and inevitably re-emerge from its periodic dormancies to offer ever-new creative frontiers for succeeding generations of artists to explore, interpret and express.

[Found at Le blog de Bernard Alapetite | Text from Wolfe Contemporary Art]

[Found at Dazed & Confused | More Photos]

Photos from the film The God Land by Aspen Michael Taylor.
You’ll find more stunning art at his blog and website.
Thanks to Dennis Cooper for the hint!

…we can believe in!

M O R E   H E R O E S

Mokhorev was the first Russian photographer who opened a door to the fragile and troubled world of children. Since the late 1980s, he has passionately explored the marginal territories of adolescence, revelations of lost childhood, and magical transformations into adulthood. Over the years, he has developed a unique style that continues to inspire many photographers and followers. His first solo exhibition outside of his homeland was in Paris in 1992, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was held within the framework of Mois de la Photo à Paris Photography Festival where he became a sensation, one of the key photographers to emerge from the former Soviet Union

His series "Games Children Play" about orphans and street kids of St. Petersburg attracted tremendous attention. In the US, it was shown in "Changing Reality" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1991; at the MIT Museum in "Russian Photographers Renewal and Metamorphosis from the late Soviet Era to the 1990s," Cambridge, MA; and in "Russia: Chronicles of Change" at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL, both in 1996.

"Ambiguous Desires" (shown here) considers an age of discovering one’s sensuality, a mysterious metamorphosis from childhood into adolescence. Known for its social crises and emotional tempests, it is also a period when the tacit becomes explicit, when what is recognized becomes understood. Mokhorev possesses a special portal allowing him to enter the complex universe of pubescent youth, and to capture the wonder of innocence and unfamiliar longings expressed by his models. The growth of human understanding and sexual awareness in a teenager is one of the most intricate, amazing, and beautiful phenomena in nature.