It’s not every day you can walk into an exhibition and literally picture yourself fucking the artist. Jose Da Silva’s Unter Männern offers the viewer just that experience. Via the reproduction of a series of intimate self-portraits taken while having sex with his partner, Da Silva manages to present a penetrating (no pun intended) insight into gay male subjectivity. However, there is nothing shocking about these works, nothing scandalous or pornographic. The exhibition is a much more cerebral affair than a physical one, and operates on a very different level from that implied by its subject matter.
The work functions most effectively as a gentle persuasion, an easily digested sequence of quite beautiful images informed more by aesthetics than gay porn that, through their intimacy and subtlety, succeed in opening up a space for pondering the bigger questions that lie just beneath—or in front of—the surface of the images. By not being graphic, aggressive or intentionally ‘shocking’, the images manage to enact a far more difficult objective—that of really engaging the viewer. Instead of lecturing heterosexuals on gay sexual identity, Da Silva invites us to share his insecurities, uncertainties and vulnerabilities, and to question the ways in which sexual identity is formulated and expressed, not only from a gay perspective but also from a heterosexual one. It is this breaking down of difference that is the true triumph of this exhibition.
This probing inquisitiveness (beyond sexual curiosity) is persistent enough to dominate the sexual content. It is a deeper, searching quality regarding questions of subjectivity and identification. The way this happens is as complex and confusing as the formulation of sexual identity itself. In the photographs Da Silva subverts typical