Rewrite and translate this title The Artist Using Vintage Gay Porn to Make a Dark Statement to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

As a teenager, Pacifico Silano was embarrassed about spending time at Undercover Pleasures, the adult book store his parents owned in Brooklyn. But as an appropriation artist, he’s spent the past decade reworking hardcore content, drawing from his lived experiences as a queer man. He’s estranged from his Italian-American father because of his sexuality; and saw his gay uncle, who died of HIV complications at the height of the Aids crisis in 1989, scrubbed from his family history. “I always think of that dichotomy of these contradictions,” he says about the industry his parents worked in versus the conservative values his dad was committed to. “But in so many ways it makes sense because there’s so many contradictions in my work.”

Pacifico takes images from vintage gay pornography and recontextualises them to explore ideas of loss, longing and queer melancholy in relation to HIV and Aids. In 2020, when America was able to stave off a Trump election, he started thinking about the “crisis of masculinity” that had led to his populist rise to power. Images that once were a lot more innocuous, like models dressed up in military clothing or as police officers, took on a new meaning, becoming loaded and charged. “In some ways, it’s subverting these positions of male dominance and power during a very homophobic time period when the images were made. But at the same time, it kind of reifies that iconography,” he says. “So it’s both transgressive and regressive at the same time. I’ve become very interested in that duality and that contradictory nature of the images that I work with.”

His new book, Shadow Cast, is all about that grey area. Based on a piece he had in his solo exhibition at Island Gallery in New York called Psychosexual Thriller, he explored the tension between desire and danger that exists in a lot of gay spaces. Like the book, it featured enlarged portraits of men in the shadows, depicted as archetypes of masculinity: cowboys, police officers and sheriffs. It was sourced from 1970s and 80s erotica: Blueboy (which was a little softer and more delicate), Honcho (which focussed on dominance, aggression and BDSM), and other unbranded, low-budget publications (that draw from “bad 70s porn plots”).

“I can tell what year a photograph was taken just based on the way that the style changes and also the way that the body type changes. During the height of the Aids crisis, gay men started to work out more. Their bodies changed and so did what was considered desirable,” Pacifico explains. “They’re trying to build their bodies up and make them look a very specific way to counteract these ideas around illness.” 

The original material Pacifico pulls from is hardcore – men in the nude and in the act of sex – but the artist homes in on his subject’s faces, re-photographing each image with a macro lens so the printing dots become enlarged; cropping them to remove the explicit and recontextualise the content.

Across 38 pages of inky Risograph prints, eroticised bodies of anonymous models (many of whom died from Aids because of their line of work) become gritty headshots obscured through rasterization and printing. “[It’s] this metaphor for desire and danger and being in the shadows,” he says. Flicking through the book also leaves ink on the reader’s fingers, which, Pacifico says, “implicates the viewer in the act of looking at this source material,” he says. “The tactility and the physicality of it is very important.”

Two colour images break the flow of the black and white series. A tender photograph of a man in undone denim shorts, a daisy between his thighs, acts as a counterpoint to the underlying tension and violence in the rest of the shadowy images. Another called Body Double captures a man in an act of passion, who looks detached and mechanical. In the rest of the images, there’s tension and sadness: the models avert their gaze, or softly challenge the viewer. 

“There can be something really empowering about reclaiming something that’s really not historically kind to you, but at the same time, it could also be reifying that,” says Pacifico. “I just like that dance.”

Shadow Cast by Pacifico Silano is published by Loose Joints, and is out now. 

As a teenager, Pacifico Silano was embarrassed about spending time at Undercover Pleasures, the adult book store his parents owned in Brooklyn. But as an appropriation artist, he’s spent the past decade reworking hardcore content, drawing from his lived experiences as a queer man. He’s estranged from his Italian-American father because of his sexuality; and saw his gay uncle, who died of HIV complications at the height of the Aids crisis in 1989, scrubbed from his family history. “I always think of that dichotomy of these contradictions,” he says about the industry his parents worked in versus the conservative values his dad was committed to. “But in so many ways it makes sense because there’s so many contradictions in my work.”

Pacifico takes images from vintage gay pornography and recontextualises them to explore ideas of loss, longing and queer melancholy in relation to HIV and Aids. In 2020, when America was able to stave off a Trump election, he started thinking about the “crisis of masculinity” that had led to his populist rise to power. Images that once were a lot more innocuous, like models dressed up in military clothing or as police officers, took on a new meaning, becoming loaded and charged. “In some ways, it’s subverting these positions of male dominance and power during a very homophobic time period when the images were made. But at the same time, it kind of reifies that iconography,” he says. “So it’s both transgressive and regressive at the same time. I’ve become very interested in that duality and that contradictory nature of the images that I work with.”

His new book, Shadow Cast, is all about that grey area. Based on a piece he had in his solo exhibition at Island Gallery in New York called Psychosexual Thriller, he explored the tension between desire and danger that exists in a lot of gay spaces. Like the book, it featured enlarged portraits of men in the shadows, depicted as archetypes of masculinity: cowboys, police officers and sheriffs. It was sourced from 1970s and 80s erotica: Blueboy (which was a little softer and more delicate), Honcho (which focussed on dominance, aggression and BDSM), and other unbranded, low-budget publications (that draw from “bad 70s porn plots”).

“I can tell what year a photograph was taken just based on the way that the style changes and also the way that the body type changes. During the height of the Aids crisis, gay men started to work out more. Their bodies changed and so did what was considered desirable,” Pacifico explains. “They’re trying to build their bodies up and make them look a very specific way to counteract these ideas around illness.” 

The original material Pacifico pulls from is hardcore – men in the nude and in the act of sex – but the artist homes in on his subject’s faces, re-photographing each image with a macro lens so the printing dots become enlarged; cropping them to remove the explicit and recontextualise the content.

Across 38 pages of inky Risograph prints, eroticised bodies of anonymous models (many of whom died from Aids because of their line of work) become gritty headshots obscured through rasterization and printing. “[It’s] this metaphor for desire and danger and being in the shadows,” he says. Flicking through the book also leaves ink on the reader’s fingers, which, Pacifico says, “implicates the viewer in the act of looking at this source material,” he says. “The tactility and the physicality of it is very important.”

Two colour images break the flow of the black and white series. A tender photograph of a man in undone denim shorts, a daisy between his thighs, acts as a counterpoint to the underlying tension and violence in the rest of the shadowy images. Another called Body Double captures a man in an act of passion, who looks detached and mechanical. In the rest of the images, there’s tension and sadness: the models avert their gaze, or softly challenge the viewer. 

“There can be something really empowering about reclaiming something that’s really not historically kind to you, but at the same time, it could also be reifying that,” says Pacifico. “I just like that dance.”

Shadow Cast by Pacifico Silano is published by Loose Joints, and is out now.