Packed for Pleasure and the Secret Routes of Desire

Packed for Pleasure: A history of desire in hiding

written LE MILE

In 1928, Jean Cocteau’s Le Livre blanc was published anonymously in Paris, its account of homosexual desire circulating without the author’s name. Nearly three decades later, the Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen made his American debut in Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial, under the name Tom of Finland. Both publications appeared in Packed for Pleasure, the exhibition presented by the Tom of Finland Foundation at Galerie Regard in Paris from 1 to 13 October. Their presence established a history in which publishing a sexual image could mean disguising its author, its audience or its purpose.

Tom of Finland Foundation presents Packed for Pleasure, supported by Pornhub, Galerie Regard, Paris, France. Artworks: (left) Man Ray, (right) Drake Carr.
Photography © Maria Rubtsova/BFA

Curated by Brooke Wise and co-produced by Cocteau historian Chloë Cassens, with support from Pornhub, the exhibition brought together work by figures including Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, alongside contemporary artists such as Drake Carr, Emma Stern, Violet Chachki and Nicolo Gentile. Its most revealing material, however, lay in the methods people had devised to make erotic culture accessible under threat of prosecution or social punishment.

Physique Pictorial was a particularly ingenious example. Bob Mizer’s magazine presented men’s bodies through the respectable vocabulary of athletics and bodybuilding, making room for a readership that recognised an additional meaning in the images. In its spring 1957 issue, Mizer published Laaksonen’s drawings and supplied the name by which the artist would become known. Le Livre blanc tells a different story of concealment. Cocteau continued to leave his name off the book even after contributing illustrations to later editions.

At Regard, CRT monitors, physique magazines, books and printed ephemera filled a darkened room modelled on an adult video store. Elsewhere, moving-image works were viewed through a glory-hole structure. Recreating these settings inside a publicly advertised exhibition raised a curatorial difficulty. The furniture and viewing arrangements could be reproduced; the consequences of being seen using them were harder to convey. A back room entered through a gallery invitation carries a different charge from one whose visitors have reasons to conceal their presence.

Leigh Ledare, Mom As Baby Jane, 2004, impression lambda, cadre bois, 154,9 cm x 121,9 cm

Pornhub had previously supported The Pleasure Principle at Maccarone in Los Angeles in 2019. Its backing of Packed for Pleasure came with an explicit contemporary argument. In the exhibition’s press material, Alex Kekesi, its VP of Brand and Community, linked the importance of erotic archives to age-verification laws and social-media deplatforming. The sponsorship placed those disputes beside the histories of Cocteau and Tom of Finland. That association offered Pornhub a useful cultural context for its position, while making its own interest in the exhibition clear. The company was helping present an archive through which it could also argue its case.

Nicolo Gentile’s Hold On Me began with Philadelphia’s 12th Street Gym and the older gay men who had frequented it. He took impressions of their hands and cast them in aluminium salvaged from the gym’s demolition. In the Cable Flyes works, the casts appear with knurled and chromed steel, cable mounts, expanded metal and magazine print. The choice of material ties each hand impression to the building those men remembered. As Gentile explained in V Magazine, “I wanted to take all that muscle, machinery, sweat, sex, and history and turn it toward something more intimate.”

Nicolo Gentile, Hold On Me II (Cable Flyes), 2023–2026. Cast and electroformed aluminum sourced from demolition site on knurled and chromed steel, cable mount, expanded metal sheet, offset magazine print on coated paper. 91.4 × 22.9 × 7.6 cm.

Nicolo Gentile, Hold On Me III (Cable Flyes), 2023–2026. Cast and electroformed aluminum sourced from demolition site on knurled and chromed steel, cable mount, expanded metal sheet, offset magazine print on coated paper. 91.4 × 22.9 × 7.6 cm.

Tom of Finland Foundation presents Packed for Pleasure, supported by Pornhub, Galerie Regard, Paris, France. Photography © Maria Rubtsova/BFA.

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credits
header image: Tom of Finland Foundation presents Packed for Pleasure at Galerie Regard, Paris, France.
Photography © Maria Rubtsova/BFA.

CHRISTO at GAGOSIAN — What If Air Could Be Held in Form

What If Air Could Be Held in Form
Christo at Gagosian London

written LE MILE

Air becomes visible in Christo’s work at the exact moment it is forced into a limit. In the early polyethylene pieces from the 1960s, the gesture remains stripped to its essentials: a transparent skin pulled tight with rope, the surface responding to internal pressure through small distortions that give the volume a fragile, almost provisional presence. The air inside does not transform, yet it begins to register as something held, something that occupies space with a quiet insistence once a boundary is drawn around it.

That same operation now unfolds at architectural scale in Air Package on a Ceiling, conceived in 1968 with Jeanne-Claude and realized for the first time at Gagosian in London. The installation stretches across the full width of the gallery, a suspended volume that descends into the room until it hovers just above head height. Its presence is immediate, not through spectacle or surface complexity, but through the way it interrupts the given proportions of the space. The ceiling no longer reads as a distant, stable plane; it is pulled downward, redefined by a form that holds itself in tension.

Christo
Wrapped Ceiling, 1965
Installation view: Office building located in Mid-town Manhattan, New York

Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
Photo: Thomas Cugini
Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

Christo
5,600 Cubicmeter Package (first skin)
Installation view: Kassel, 1968

Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
Photo: Klaus Baum
Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

Moving through the room brings the work into focus and the surface gathers and tightens where it meets the rope, light revealing the internal pressure that keeps the structure intact. Edges remain unstable, never fully separating from the surrounding architecture, so that the volume appears contained and in continuous relation to the space around it. Air shifts from background to substance, encountered as density and resistance. The installation carries the logic of the early works forward without altering its terms. Containment remains the central act, yet its implications expand once the boundary engages directly with the architecture. Drawings and models shown alongside the piece trace this shift, revealing how a freestanding form evolved into a suspended condition that absorbs the room into its structure. The work reorganizes it from within, placing the visitor in a field defined by pressure, proximity, and scale.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Big Air Package
Installation view: Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany, 2010-13

Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

A similar precision underlies Wrapped Automobile—Volvo, Model PV-544 (1981), presented in the second gallery after decades out of view. The car is enclosed within a continuous wrapping that follows its contours closely enough to register its volume while withholding any access to its surface. What remains is a held form, its mass translated through the tension of the material that surrounds it. The gesture fixes the object within a state that neither resolves into use nor dissolves into absence, maintaining a suspended presence shaped entirely by the conditions imposed on it.

Across these works, Christo’s practice unfolds through a consistent attention to how boundaries produce form. Materials remain direct, their role confined to enclosing, binding, and sustaining pressure. What they make visible is not an internal essence, but the act of holding itself, a condition that gives shape to what would otherwise remain ungraspable.
And the exhibition gathers these propositions into a single spatial experience that clarifies how far this logic extends. A surface is drawn, tension is applied, and a volume emerges that can be walked under, circled, and measured against one’s own body. The effect relies on the precision with which the intangible is momentarily given form, held just long enough to be encountered.

Christo: Air is on view at Gagosian London, Grosvenor Hill, from 21 May to 18 July 2026, presenting the first realization of Air Package on a Ceiling (1968) alongside early works and archival material that trace Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s exploration of air as a contained and perceptible condition.

Contact Sheet: Christo wrapping "Wrapped Automobile-Volvo, Model PV-544" (1981)

Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

Christo
Wrapped Automobile-Volvo, Model PV-544, 1981
Volvo, Model PV-544, fabric and rope
60 x 61 x 171 inches (152.4 x 154.9 x 434.3 cm)

© Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

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header banner image credit
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 42,390 Cubic Feet Package, Installation view: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1966

Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation / Photo: Carroll T. Hartwell / Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

MYRIAM BOULOS — The Photographic Worlds

The Photographic Worlds of Myriam Boulos
Pas de mode d’emploi pour le chaos

interview + written ALBAN E. SMAJLI

A city simmers beneath its own legends, the flavor of diesel and cardamom mixing with the hum of aftershocks and the slow unfurling of light across battered facades, and it is here that Myriam Boulos lifts her camera, not in search of the dramatic or the picturesque but to gather the residue of touch, the quiet accumulation of moments that cling to walls, slip through open doors, and root themselves in skin.

Myriam Boulos
Sexual Fantasies 2023

Myriam Boulos
Ongoing War, 2024

Beirut, compass and constant, shapes her visual language—a grammar built on light leaking around corners, voices echoing in courtyards, the thick air bending time, bodies weaving through memory and anticipation. Each photograph absorbs the density of this world, carrying the textures and temperatures of lived experience without the urge to isolate or resolve, every frame a continuous exchange, a movement toward feeling without the pressure of conclusion.

The Foam Paul Huf Award, long established as an amplifier for new photographic perspectives, acknowledges Boulos not through ceremony or simple recognition but by making space, a shift in the ongoing geography of the medium, allowing a current to pass from the streets of Beirut into the global bloodstream of image-making. The work circulates as a living archive, a collective diary shaped by encounters, complicity, and the urge to bear witness without reducing complexity to explanation.

Myriam Boulos moves with a certainty shaped by intuition, the city’s sound and temperature anchoring her practice even as the images begin to travel—entering new rooms, new languages, new ways of seeing. As she prepares her solo exhibition at Foam, the work assembles itself as an ecosystem, layering tenderness, unrest, desire, and refusal into a sequence that resists summary and insists on being felt. In these images, the right to feel is inhabited, lived, and sustained, and the city—her city—never steps outside the frame. The conversation that follows steps into this territory, unfolding through a landscape shaped by accumulation, intuition, and the enduring presence of feeling that moves steadily through each image and word.

Alban E. Smajli
You shoot in chaos, but your images feel calm. Is that contradiction intentional?

Myriam Boulos
Ouf, I never thought of my images as calm! It is funny because people also perceive me as a calm person, but in my head, things are anything but calm. Maybe my images are a way of exteriorizing and organizing my internal chaos?

Offline—does that word feel like a refuge, or a threat?

Both. It makes me dream of the idea of refuge, because I think most of us are addicted to the online world, but it also makes me think of the minutes right after the Beirut port explosion, when we were forcibly offline without understanding what was happening and without being able to reach our loved ones. It also makes me think of Gaza, which is forcibly offline on the worst nights of Israeli bombings during the ongoing genocide.

Offline can also suggest being disconnected from dominant systems or structures. Do you see your practice as a conscious step outside of what photography is "supposed" to be?

Honestly, I am not trying to fit or not fit into anything when I create images; I am just trying to be honest with myself. The images are encounters between my internal world and the universes of the people I photograph. But I do consciously and constantly deconstruct the medium of photography, which is historically colonial and patriarchal.

How do you decide what to show, and what to protect?

Being aware of the power of images and our responsibility as photographers, when I take risks, it is hand in hand with the people in the images: they are the ones who choose what they want to show or hide. From there, I usually follow my gut; I know when a picture is a big crush for me or not. I know if I want to share it with the world or not.

You mention that your images are also about the right to feel, to desire, and not be defined by normalized pain. What emotional truths are you most committed to revealing?

It is important for me to take space with our emotions in general. As a highly sensitive person, I always feel a lot, and this comes with the bad habit of trying to hide my emotions in order not to be “too much.” Photography is a way of channeling my emotions without feeling any shame. It is also important for me to document different types of emotions and realities as a way of defying Western media’s often stereotyped, reductive, and harmful representations of our region.

Myriam Boulos
Whats Ours 2019

Who are you photographing for?

For myself, for the people in the images, for people who will find themselves in these pictures, and for people who do not think like me.

Sexual fantasies, war, neuro divergence—your work isn’t afraid of complexity. What’s the one thing people always get wrong about it?

Complexity makes it difficult for people to put me in boxes. I think the person behind the images is one thing people tend to get wrong!

What’s the most fragile thing you’ve ever captured and what’s a picture you couldn’t take?

Wolfgang Tillmans said, “If one thing matters, everything matters.” I think everything is fragile and should be handled and photographed with care, tenderness, and consideration. The pictures I couldn’t take are the ones I take in my dreams. It is a particularly frustrating feeling to wake up and not have a trace or a proof. Max Kozloff said, “With photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating.” But dreams are real to me, and I wish I could keep pictures from this world, too.

Being the first artist from the Middle East to win the Foam Paul Huf Award is groundbreaking and makes you part of a global art conversation. Do you care about that? And what does it mean to take up space as a Lebanese artist—right now, in this global frame?

I am so grateful to be part of this global conversation. I think it’s the photography industry’s role to engage with as many photographers as possible from our region. There are so many talented photographers in the Middle East, and it is necessary to see our part of the world from different perspectives and not only through a few photographers.

Myriam Boulos
Whats Ours 2019

Myriam Boulos
Ongoing War 2023

Beirut is always present. Is it your subject, your background, or your collaborator?

I think Beirut is more like my anchor. I always feel like a little alien, but in Beirut I feel more grounded. The thick air, the contrasted light, the landmarks—my body feels at home here. I feel like this is where my roots are, this is where life is, and this is where I want to understand myself and share love with others.

You once said your photos are about tenderness. Has that changed?

I think tenderness is what I will always look for—in myself, in other people, in images.

You’ve been called a storyteller. Do you feel like one or more like a collector of moments?

I feel like I am more of a collective diary-teller, if that is a word! Or a collector of diaries in the context of collective histories and experiences. But I usually call myself a documentarist.

As you prepare for your solo exhibition at Foam in 2026, what kind of visual or emotional narrative are you hoping to construct?

I hope to put together already existing work in a new way, one that will make me learn things about myself, if that makes sense.

What do you hope someone 20 years from now will feel when they look at your work?

I just hope they will feel. Anything. I can’t choose what I provoke in people, but I would be sad if my images did not provoke anything. I also hope that it brings new perspectives to people who are not informed about some realities but still have preconceived ideas about them.

First published
LE MILE Offline Edition No. 39 FW25/26

courtesy for all images (c) Myriam Boulos
header image Ongoing War, 2024 photographed by Myriam Boulos

NARGES MOHAMMADI *The Architecture of Memory

NARGES MOHAMMADI
*The Architecture of Memory

written ALBAN E. SMAJLI

Inside Brutus Rotterdam, the exhibition No One Bats an Eye by Narges Mohammadi opens with quiet force. The Barbarella space, raw and industrial, carries the rhythm of a sewing machine that hums like breath. Sand, alabaster, and clay form a fragile architecture of remembrance. A house takes shape, not as shelter, but as memory made visible.

Narges Mohammadi, born in Kabul in 1993, brings together fragments of her early life with the material language she has refined across her practice. Trained in art history in Utrecht and visual arts at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, she moves between sculpture, installation, and sound. Her process carries the intimacy of craft and the urgency of history.

Narges Mohammadi
seen by Laura Siliquini

Narges Mohammadi
seen by Laura Siliquini

In No One Bats an Eye, alabaster becomes her instrument. She hollows the stone until only a translucent layer remains. “The act of removing feels essential,” she says in the interview. “It reveals the fragility of what we carry and what remains when survival becomes daily work.” Around her, the space expands with sand and clay sculptures, enlarged family photographs pressed into loam, and domestic shapes that seem to breathe. Each object feels ordinary and ceremonial, the sewing machine, cast in alabaster, evokes her mother’s worktable. “That sound of stitching was always present,” she says. “It meant care. It meant making things last a little longer.” A lamp carved from stone glows faintly under the light. Nearby, eggs rest on the floor, symbols of both nourishment and expectation.

Mohammadi’s approach to sculpture stems from material empathy. Her earlier works in concrete, soap, halva, and straw explored endurance through touch and scent. Here, she turns to the quiet translucency of alabaster to explore what she calls “the skin of memory.” “When I carve,” she explains, “I am not building something new. I am uncovering what was already there.”

The exhibition forms a sequence of rooms, each suspended between intimacy and distance. A bench sculpted from sand invites pause, a doorway veiled in fabric opens toward light. The atmosphere moves between tenderness and gravity. Poverty, resilience, and dignity exist as shared presences rather than subjects. “The work is not about pity,” she says. “It is about visibility. About giving shape to what often stays unnamed.”

Narges Mohammadi
Er kraait geen haan naar, solo exhibition at Brutus, Rotterdam

seen by Laura Siliquini / courtesy of the Artist & Copperfield, London

Her vision resonates deeply with Brutus, an artist-driven space known for its openness to experimentation. Within its rough architecture, her installation extends beyond sculpture into social texture. Friends and collaborators assisted in the making — sifting, molding, and assembling. The process became a form of communal repair. “I wanted to build with others,” she says. “Each gesture carries someone’s care.”

No One Bats an Eye holds the resonance of inheritance. The materials carry weight and light at once, they suggest the persistence of memory through touch, the continuity of warmth through scarcity. Rubiah Balsem’s opening words framed the exhibition as a threshold: an invitation to see empathy as architecture. The work exists as a quiet resistance — a monument built from gentleness.

Through every detail, Mohammadi’s practice affirms the presence of life within constraint. Her sculptures stand as vessels of remembrance, translucent and porous, filled with breath. They hold stories of endurance, hospitality, and transformation, offered without spectacle, sustained by grace.

No One Bats an Eye remains on view at Brutus Rotterdam until December 14, 2025.

AARON JOHNSON *We All Shine On

AARON JOHNSON 

*We All Shine On

written SIMON RIEPE

It’s a sunny Wednesday in Madrid - Bowman Hal, the new gallery space at SOLO CVS near Plaza de España, is filled with vibrating colours. Surrounded by floating heads, luminous orbs and smiley faces with multiple eyes the artist Aaron Johnson is guiding through a spirit realm, his solo exhibition WE ALL SHINE ON.

Aaron Johnson was born in St. Paul, Minnesota (USA) and studied molecular and cellular biology before committing fully to art. After moving to New York and with no traditional training in painting, he discovered the work of Jackson Pollock and began exploring free, gestural painting. It echoed his background in science and his atelier became a laboratory. Experiments like colour flowing over canvases consisting of used socks glued together resulted in grotesque, yet already otherworldly figures.

Until in 2018, he showed SOLO „How the Lemons Got Loose“. The painting is part of the SOLO Collection and is his first artwork made by using acrylics on a soaking wet canvas, the technique that is keeping him engaged since then. He begins with mark-making and establishing a colour sensibility. The first day is an intense, wet process on the floor. He pours paint on watery canvas, tilts, lifts, sprays. Watches colour flow, merge and transform. Johnson is happy to give away to chance and encourages the matter to reveal itself. He is especially interested in an abstract occurrence he calls ‚Orbs‘. It’s thicker colour poured on more liquid acrylic on a wet surface. The thick colour gets ripped apart creating halo-like forms that give a lead for the next day. Then, when all is dried up, he hangs the canvas upright and starts to resolve the composition. Multiple eyes, mouthes and sometimes feed are added, giving the abstract flow of colour a more figurative from. He calls them „Moon Monks“ (2025), „Star Travelers“ (2025) or „River Spirit, Tree Spirit“ (2025). Spirits which have emerged from the process itself. And it seems like Johnson merely helped them to reveal themselves to the world.

Aaron Johnson
We Wait For You, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
157.5 x 127 cm

Aaron Johnson
We All Shine On Installation View / © Bowman Hal

Missing a deeper connection with nature, Johnson moved from NYC to LA about 2 years ago. There, surrounded by cacti and green mountains, animism slipped into his body of work, believing that nature holds consciousness. His paintings have grown lighter, happier, infused with a sense of connection. Spirits rise out of rivers and trees, glowing ancestors linger in skies, pairs of figures merge into one another like lovers or reunited souls. The beings in WE ALL SHINE ON remind us, that we are all just made of stardust, that we just form a small part of the bigger picture. And they are welcoming us into their circle and let us get in touch with the interconnectedness.

It is striking that one has a hard time leaving the exhibition without feeling lifted, happy and hopeful. Do Johnson’s spirits have a healing power? In today’s climate of crisis - wars , right wing politics, ecological collapse - these canvases feel like an intentional counter-image. Johnson does not paint apocalypse. He paints visual rehearsals for connection, realism where light and colour choose kindness. We all must be able to imagine a positive feature before we can build it. And WE ALL SHINE ON helps us do exactly that.
Yet, amid the cosmic vastness, there’s always a sense of humor: big feet, goofy teeth, smiley faces. Johnson’s work doesn’t want to sermonize, it invites. Because the end is not inevitable. The door is always open.

Aaron Johnson
Ascension, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
213 x 183 cm
We All Shine On Installation View / © Bowman Hal

Aaron Johnson
Earth Angel, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
157.5 x 127 cm

The exhibition is presented at Bowman Hal, a new gallery space of SOLO CVS in Madrid, in collaboration with Almine Rech. Bowman Hal is part to the international SOLO project, which supports artists through exhibitions and commissions. It’s own collection holds over 1200 works of art. For Johnson, who’s paintings are already in the MoMa in New York or the Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles, this solo exhibition marks another step in a career that spans from science studies over sock paintings to cosmic spirits and showcases his latest body of work.

WE ALL SHINE ON is on view at Bowman Hal in Madrid until November 15, 2025. If you’re able to go, give yourself time. Let the orbs do their work. Choose your favorite and stay a minute longer than what might feel reasonable. And you might notice… the paintings breathing back.

credit for header image:
Aaron Johnson / We All Shine On Installation View / © Bowman Hal

Pictures via PR
thanks to SOLO CONTEMPORARY