I Modi is a portfolio of photographs in the Infinity series, an ongoing body of work I have been making since 1997. I Modi was created using my unique process of appropriating images, subjecting them to a series of manipulations—photocopying, cutting, painting—and then photographing them extremely out of focus. In this case, the source materials are obscure erotic engravings from the Renaissance.

The back story of I Modi is layered and fascinating—even blurred one might say—and remains one of the most tantalizing stories in art history. In the 1520’s, Pietro Aretino, a Renaissance poet, satirist and friend of Titian, published the Sonetti Lussuriosi, a book of 16 explicit poems accompanied by erotic engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi. Raimondi’s engravings, in turn, had been taken from a series of drawings by Guilio Romano called I Modi (The Positions or Postures.) Aretino’s book was banned by Pope Clement VII, and Raimondi was imprisoned. All copies of the book were said to have been destroyed and little has survived save a few fragments in the British Museum. However, as might be expected, over time, many myths, stories and alleged copies of I Modi have surfaced. The most famous and widely circulated, perhaps, is a 19th century edition produced by Jean Waldeck, a French engraver and explorer, whose fabulous story was that he had found it in a Mexican convent.

My photographs are yet another layer in the pentimenti of interpretations of I Modi.  It is this layering that interests me, as it transforms the originals, giving them a new meaning in a new context. Defocusing throws a veil over the explicit detail of the sex act and renders it mysterious and dreamlike. At the same time, the lingering presence of the original remains and keeps the images charged. This polarity creates a tension between expectation and imagination as the photographs simultaneously reveal and hold back. Contrary to the normal laws of vision, a paradox attends the blur: the further one moves back, the more one can discern, and the closer one moves in, the more abstract they become. Abstracted, the sexual act becomes sculptural and the players like dancers, acrobats, athletes or wrestlers. Lovemaking becomes an act akin to others, despite it being historically set apart by censorship.