Interview

If you could collaborate with any artist, alive or dead, who would you choose?

Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Georg Baselitz, Basquiat. People who knew art reeks of sweat, piss, and sometimes sainthood. I’d add Paul Beatriz Préciado to the mix—his raw take on the body as a political battlefield in Testo Junkie would shake things up.

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The body is often central in your work. How do you use it to express your ideas and emotions?

The body is meat. Fingers in it. Flesh, blood, fluids. Not a metaphor, not an “idea.” It’s the raw material. It screams the emotion on its own. Like Deleuze says in L’Anti-Œdipe, it’s a machine of desire, a flow of intensities—nothing neat, just pure, messy life.

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Do you think art plays a role in sexual liberation?

Always. But every sexual revolution ends like an orgy on Xanax: furious at first, then everyone under blankets, watching Netflix. Society digests everything, spits it back out as categories, hashtags, inclusive slogans. Movement dead. So yes, put sex back into art. Or bury it. Préciado’s critique of gender norms as a pharmaceutical construct pushes me to rethink liberation beyond binaries.

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What influenced your reflection on sex in art?

Culturally? Porn, erotica, BDSM, trans, burlesque. My library was a sex shop made of paper. That’s how I trained my hand. My eye. My brain. Now internet killed mystery: 250 categories minimum if you want “respectable” porn. Artistically? Bourgeois, Claudel, McCarthy, Kern, De Kooning, Lucian Freud, Goya… Also Kate Moss, Nastassja Kinski, Luba, Keisha Grey, my wife, asses bouncing on the street, bars, beaches, the brain when it’s hard. And Préciado’s Testo Junkie—that testosterone-fueled manifesto on the body’s plasticity. Deleuze’s flows of desire in L’Anti-Œdipe too—all of it. Enough for a lifetime.

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Do you have taboos?

Not really. Trauma, rape, violence—there I slow down. Example: Infante. Pink plastic swimsuits, little rubber tits. My answer to the Dutroux case. Needed distance or it would kill me. I fled to Buenos Aires. Oxygen before diving back into the sludge. I still remember Knokke, the casino, the David Hamilton retrospective. Giant posters of naked girls. Parents telling kids in the sand: close your legs. That’s the world. That’s vertigo.

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How does sex shape your art?

Endless curiosity. Sex is everything: love, performance, sweat, disgust, perfume, rot, sublime ugliness. My art is the buffet of all that. Beauty and filth, arm in arm. Deleuze’s idea of the body without organs resonates—sex as a territory of becoming, not just a fixed act.

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Do you try to provoke, seduce, shock?

No. But provocation is built into the material. I just press play.

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Erotic vs pornographic art?

Ask an accountant.

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Why red?

Because it tastes. It smells. Blood + lipstick = instant cocktail. I don’t use color to represent. I use it to lick, to bite.

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Which contemporary artists inspire you?

The sincere ones. The obsessed. The ones who don’t fake it. Bourgeois. McCarthy. Newton. Mapplethorpe. Sherman. Araki. And all the others not afraid to get dirty. Préciado’s fearless dismantling of gender norms fuels me too.

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Is this exploration a confrontation with yourself?

Not a confrontation. A plunge. Like diving into a septic tank with a headlamp. Sometimes you find a pearl in the shit. Deleuze’s notion of becoming-other guides that dive—letting go of the self to find something else.

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How does painting transform your emotions?

Preparation, yes. Channeling, never. When it comes, it bursts. Otherwise it’s stillborn.

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Does your art imitate reality, transcend it, or provoke it?

Imitation? Never. Too vulgar. Transcendence? Yes. Provocation? Maybe, by accident. Deleuze’s concept of art as a line of flight pushes me toward transcendence.

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Exploring taboos—is it fear or curiosity?

Curiosity. The hardest drug.

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If you could keep only one material?

Chinese ink. Because it forgives nothing. You fuck up, it stays.

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If your art was a dish?

Oysters gratiné with champagne. Freshness, cum, bubbles.

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Sex in your art—is it provocation, celebration, exploration?

Exploration to be celebrated. With candles or sex toys, doesn’t matter. Préciado’s take on sex as a political act adds a layer to that celebration.

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How would you react if someone said your art is too explicit?

I’d laugh. As if you could be “too” alive.

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Does art make sex more beautiful or uglier?

Both. Like life.

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Where’s the line between art and obscenity?

Quality. A bad vinyl is obscene. A good record never.

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Does art have the right to shock?

Of course. Otherwise it’s decoration. I don’t aim to shock. But if it shocks, it means it touched.

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If you could exhibit in an unusual place?

Versailles. Make the gilded walls twerk.

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What’s the strangest dream you had about your art?

Parental advisory.