Garoto com local (“Boy, can host”) is an ongoing body of work developed from escort-ad images and public reviews in Aracaju (Brazil). Through drawing, text, serial titles, and gold, the project suspends visual gratification to examine how gay male desire is shaped by evaluation, reputation, and the commodification of the “available” body.
The project begins with a problem of distance. Pornography shaped gay male desire through bodies that are perfected, unreachable, and consumed through a screen—bodies that belong to the realm of the impossible. This project shifts the focus toward another kind of image: one that is not only watched, but negotiated, priced, reviewed, and made available within a specific city.
The works are developed from photographs found on escort-ad listing sites used in Aracaju, Sergipe. In this context, the image is not an abstract fantasy but a local instrument: it must persuade, justify, and sell. It carries risk, precariousness, and uneven access to “good” visibility. Differences in lighting, framing, resolution, and setting function as traces of structural inequality inside the sex market itself—where the right image can mean safety, income, or disappearance.
The project refuses to deliver pornography back to the viewer. The drawings are built to suspend direct visual gratification and to redirect attention toward the mechanisms that turn a body into a validated product. Around each image, the work places excerpts of public customer reviews—texts that evaluate not only sex, but conversation, intelligence, security, and “value for money.” In doing so, Garoto com local frames desire as a commercial language, where reputation, branding, and repeated demand organize intimacy.
Titles follow the logic of the platforms: initials and serial numbers, as assigned by the system. The naming exposes how identity becomes interchangeable inside a catalog. Gold—metallic paint and gilded leaf—appears as an economic marker. It amplifies the contradiction at the core of the project: the attempt to produce value, legitimacy, and desirability for what is treated as a commodity.
This work is not a denunciation, nor a romanticization, of sex work or pornography. It is an investigation into how pornographic language shapes gay male self-image and the conditions under which desire becomes thinkable—especially when real spaces for non-heteronormative desire are scarce. The project also speaks from inside a lived history: a trajectory marked by fear, exposure, and the experience of being sexualized as power. Without claiming to speak for sex workers, Garoto com local examines a system where different lives—including the artist’s—are crossed by shared logics of evaluation, violence, and validation.
Availability / Inquiry
Selected works from this project may be available as unique peices. For availability, pricing, and acquisition conditions, contact:
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