Eye Contact — Karlo Martinez

Eye Contact by Karlo Martinez unfolds as a vast collage, the artist’s favoured practice, in the form of a book. Taking inspiration from artist-iconographers, he draws from 2000s and Tumblr era gay pornographic videos, extracting meticulous details and enlarging them in scale in order to accentuate their sculptural and digital “flesh.” Stripped of their original context, these images weave a new coherence within a fresco: a gallery of former fantasies and self-exposure quietly dialogues with fragments of the everyday, captured on the artist’s phone, blurring the line between desire and the ordinary. This juxtaposition of imagery resonates with the logic of circulation that defined the early aesthetics of online culture, where acts of capturing, cropping, posting and reblogging build fragmented, yet deeply meaningful, visual universes through accumulation and montage. The book thus becomes a mirror of a subjective archive of imagery, where sex was performed, subverting the codes of intimacy and banality and reinserting them into a collective narrative. As the pages unfold, like a long digital scroll, the succession of scenes, shifts in light, and changes of setting outline a sense of temporality, as if one were following the thread of a long weekend of wanderings and encounters. Between corporeal intensity, suggested but never shown, and the mundane details of daily life, the reader is invited to navigate through a visual diary, where everything exists as fleeting sensations and diffuse impressions. In Eye Contact, the artist orchestrates the encounter of two seemingly opposite worlds that nonetheless reveal formal and affective resonances.