The work of photographer Marcelo Gabriel Yañez is the subject of this issue of MATTE Magazine, a periodical with a specific interest in queer issues, and often dedicated to one artist per publication. Yañez, a Puerto Rican artist, brings together a series of primarily black-and-white images focused on the male nude, landscape, and aspects of the built environment, such as cemeteries.
Yañez’s images were taken during his first three years of college at New York University, in locations ranging from Spain to North Carolina. Largely in chronological order, Yañez’s sequence begins with intimate explorations of male nudity in domestic space and transition into an alternating flow of images that unite in similarity the twist of a tree limb, a medieval column, and a swimming torso. Space is shaped by active presence or absence of the human form, with the cemetery providing the midpoint of this idea through commemoration of existence now nonexistent.
MATTE Magazine is a platform for new ideas in photography edited and published since 2010 by Matthew Leifheit.