Pedro Slim »Un chant d’amour«

The photographic career of Pedro Slim (Lebanon, 1950, lives in Mexico City) spans more than four decades and has focused on a long-term series: From the street to the studio. The beginning took place in Mexico City in the mid-1980s and, in particular, in the author's photographic studio. Attracted by a type of male beauty that did not exist in the photographic mainstream culture of Mexico at the time, Slim began a life's work dedicated to portraying the unseen: images of young men whose origin and place in Mexican society had excluded them historically from any sphere, including that of representation. Window cleaners, fire-eaters, and newspaper salesmen became models of a typology of desire, proper to the photographer's aesthetic quests, but also to a social drive that found a certain seduction in the disallowed.

This exhibition—the title of which alludes to Jean Genet’s homonymous film from 1950—is composed of a selection of the author's most representative series and portraits taken during his travels to other geographies—photographs which to a great extent had remained unseen by the public until today. The pieces included here respond to the author's commitment to analog photography and the developing and printing processes that give the image a unique material quality, dated to a specific time.

In the broad group that integrates this exhibition, we can see models such as Durango, José Antonio, Mono, Ernesto, Patachín and others, who represent a lost generation due to the inequality of this megalopolis. What survives is the trace of their daily life and their eros, in images that make up a portrait salon that reformulates the academic and classical ideals of modern art, and contrasts with the aspirational imagery of the mass media. What remains is the visual representation of a mestizo youth, evocative and provocative for its nudity and erotism.

As part of From the Street to the Studio, the exhibition also presents the transition from the author's contemplative interests to a formalist experimentation with the male body and its relationship with light, which manifest Slim's commitment to observing that which has remained unseen.

Finally, the exhibition brings together a group of portraits taken with color film during the photographer's trips to the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean, the Cedro River in Colombia, and Philadelphia in the United States. Being an exception in his creative output, they constitute an interest in the recent reading of his work. Thus, the present exhibition covers a period of forty years of uninterrupted photographic production, and presents a temporality of desire that questions the limits of representation, and the ways of unveiling what had previously been dismissed.

— César González-Aguirre