In his Tenderness series, the Berlin-based artist assembles book covers he collected from the streets with vintage American gay erotica
“Berlin can also be sensitive and gentle,” says the Polish artist Aaron Moth about the city he lives in. “Maybe it is also because I look at a given place a little differently and I try to see more delicate details in the rough and dark Berlin poses.” For his recent photo-collage series Tenderness, Moth searched the German capital for book covers and what he calls, “untold stories in the form of left-over photos or dried flowers, or what I like very much: dedications or signatures of [the books’] former owners.”
The artist then assembled his findings with images of 1960s and 70s American gay pornography, which he collects. A glassine cover shields the nine collages with a hazy finish, shrouding moments of undressing or even climax, with a sense of mystery. A book with worn orange-coloured corners frames a couple having sex, while a scarlet cover provides the backdrop for a man whose face is covered by his own knee, his lower body cropped. The rest of him lives in another collage which reveals his underwear slipping off.
This series has been turned into a beautiful soft-cover book, published by FORMA EDITIONS, which is based in London. Physicality and tactility – whether in the form of a book, or contact between two people – has changed for Moth, in the time since creating Tenderness and releasing it as a book. “This whole situation around the world now is not easy for me – limited contacts and lack of art are bad for me,” he says. The pictures’ connection to another – yet no less politically-charged – pandemic, however, builds an unexpected connection between then and now. Similar to Moth’s overall approach to his subject, he lets the Aids pandemic cast a subtle shadow onto the work. “I tell it from a different, more romantic and sensitive side,” he says. “They weren’t only porn stars, they were also guys who felt, fell in love, and wanted to live – as we all do.” He believes the era’s pornography and erotica aesthetic pushed the limits of the gay community and left a broader influence on visual culture.
Tenderness is published by FORMA EDITIONS and is available now.