When I was in my early twenties, I could become aroused to the point of terror. The source of this arousal was sometimes less than an image and less than a sentence. Somewhere in Henry Miller, he observes the shadow his cock makes on a bathroom wall. That did it – way more than the kaleidoscope of disembodied genitals in his fiction. The shadow of a cock gave reality, access, like details in pornography that convey the truth of an event, the evidence of bodies and orgasms. The shadow of a cock, a shadow play that gave me permission, that gave me access.

Perhaps this is what Roland Barthes meant when he coined the term ‘punctum’ in his book Camera Lucida. A punctum is a detail that reframes an image, so that it occurs on the stage of the viewer’s psychic life. It’s a way into the truth of the image, and because of its very indigestible quality, it stands outside of the rest of the information.

Chris Komater fashioned a series of photos by borrowing gestures and physical attitudes from famous paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Caravaggio. His models, Jack and Mack, deities of bear sex, have a different species of fame, and this adds to the pleasure of these works.  

Like any artist, Komater wants to demonstrate a truth that he is living. There are (at least) two truths here, and the way that they relate makes for the drama in these works. First, a Bear Ideal of desire and beauty relates outwards and inwards to a living community, or better, a sub-culture. Jack and Mack are men Komater fantasised about.

Second, these images are in dialogue with (or underwritten by) the history of the nude in Western art. Komater positions a new kind of beauty in that frame. Think of gay nakedness ‘hiding’ in the Greek god–poses in athletic pictorial magazines of the 1950s, or classical imagery in the work of George Platt Lynes and his contemporaries, in which the performance of official culture underwrites queer desire.

Likewise, Komater shares his excitement with us, presenting it in a familiar light. Jack takes poses from Bellini and Mack takes poses from Caravaggio. You could say Komater explores the difference between cooked and raw. That is, how can these anarchic bodies be ordered? Then again, he is making a gift to his community (as did the two painters he emulates), presenting it with his version of the sublime.

What makes the naked body proper? Komater records the performance of two kinds of affect. Bellini isolated his saints and deities in sacred space, like sight in heaven. Jack is a porn film star, a heavenly figure of light, never very expressive, otherworldly. Bellini’s saints have little expression – I’m supposed to fill in the blank with my own feelings. I wonder if that explains the slight emptiness of the great porn stars, like Joey Stefano. In contrast, Caravaggio presented a familiar world – sacredness burst into it like an emergency, 911 Miracle. Mack made films but he was mostly a renowned prostitute, like some of Caravaggio’s friends and models who were emphatically of this world. Someone Komater could miraculously have sex with.

Some these meaty bodies translate into aesthetic or spiritual or community good, but I live most intensely in the accident, like the skin on Jack’s hip that has been dented by his elastic underwear band. It is a punctum that displays the reality of this body / deity and gives me access to him.