Sebastián Gherrë – Firework cum (2016)

Revisiting the first instance of Gherrë’s work I posted, I realize I equivocated a bit too much.

Further encounters with his work have caused me to warm to his so-blunt you can only call it heavy-handed and acontextual style.

I’m not usually a fan of the throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach. (My nemesis when I was a photography MFA student had exactly such an approach–in the interest of full disclosure, she’s one of two people in a class of 17 that is paying her bills with her creative endeavors.) But with Gherrë there’s a sense of both openness to experimentation that is damn near playful more often than not wed to a commitment to an unflinching and omnivorous eye.

It’s a little too pat to compare his work to someone like Ren Hang–an artist whose is equally out and who works with similar prolific profusion. (In fact, lately I find myself rather put off by what I feel are Hang’s tendency to be casually shallow, mean-spirited and cruel in his work.)

But it is an interesting comparison, in so far as Gherrë‘s photos show ever sign of becoming less focused on provocation and more focused the inherent provocation in moments presented without context and therefore rely upon success or failure with what the convey about immediacy.

The above print is actually enormously clever in it’s composition. The viewers eye follows the boys white inner right thigh down into the frame at a diagonal. A lesser talent would’ve sought a bilateral top-to-bottom symmetry, but they inner left leg juts off at a different angle, pulling the dick in hand off a rigid top-to-bottom mid-line. (The frame is bottom heavy, but the angle of the blanket manages to tie everything together so that it doesn’t feel unbalanced.)

There’s also the way the slight curve of the boys erection and the way it forms a sort of ever so subtle s curve from the base of the cock through the spurting line of ejaculate–allowing for one of those serendipitous moments where things line up almost magically and the lead semen globule floats perfectly aligned with the boy’s suprasternal notch.

And honestly, this is the closest I’ve seen to a photo I’ve been trying to make for almost a decade now.