Male longing melted into poetic pictures

Exterface are two 24-year-old French artists, Julien and Stéphane, who have united to create their own company. They produce poetic pictures of sensuality, espacially in the male form — its desires and meanings. Psychologically charged, Exterface push their models to show a hidden side. They attempt to manipulate them - exposing them, stripping them until they are lost between coloured light and darkness. Human isn't a human anymore; human becomes an indecent, urban, disguised, videogenic creature.

Exterface's iconography is sexually charged, but always expresses an interior duality. Each series tells a story as a fresco where the plot is 'all is not what it seems'. Julien and Stéphane invite us to attend a spectacle where the model seems palpable yet somehow unreal. More than photographers, Julien and Stéphane are directors, painters and scenario writers. They play with artistic currents to prove that human nature hasn't revealed all its secrets just yet.

Plush, poetic and pornographic — all adjectives describing Fassbinder’s legendary homoerotic classic Querelle Exterface’s work brings to mind. Intoxicatingly heady scenes, fascinating in their complexity, are bathed in sultry colors, so superlative in their execution, it’s impossible to imagine them more vivid.