WAP Boys / Certified Iconic (2022)

This work emerges from a pop imaginary that lives in the memory of those who truly consume images obsessively, not only as entertainment, but as visual language, gesture, and cultural code. It begins from one of those very specific moments that flashes by on screen, yet remains permanently imprinted on anyone who has watched it enough times to recognize it instantly. It is not a literal quotation, but an affective reconstruction of a frame charged with attitude, excess, sensuality, and power.

What interested me most was that sense of doubled force: two bodies in symmetry, two mirrored presences, two figures existing somewhere between performance, desire, and self-possession. By translating that composition into a gay version, I wanted to shift the center of fantasy without losing the original image’s intensity. Here, the reference stops being only feminine and becomes something else: a queer mirror, muscular, provocative, and fully aware of its own theatricality.

There is also an intention to create immediate recognition for those who share this pop vocabulary. Anyone who lived with that reference, who returned to that video over and over, who knows how to identify an iconic moment from only a few seconds or a single gesture, understands the source almost without it being named. The work plays with that sensation: collective memory, the pleasure of getting the reference, that instant when someone looks and thinks I know exactly where this comes from.

More than recreating a scene, the piece celebrates excess, seduction, and image-making as spectacle. These two bodies do not appear only as sensual figures, but as monuments to pop pushed to its limit, polished, choreographed, excessive, and impossible to ignore.