QCA Art: Pierre Et Gilles

After a recent QCA Art on the Bad Behaviour 2008 calendar, a few comments mentioned the photography of Pierre Et Gilles, a gay French couple that make glittery photographs filled with myth, camp and homoeroticism.
Since the mid-1970s when these two handsome men met, fell in love and began making art together, they’ve produced a consistently sensuous body of work that’s an unabashed mix of commercial and high art, glamour, poetry and homoeroticism. In their work, the latter often directly refers to the sexiness of mythic and religious iconography, like an artful prayer card with a colorful illustration of a loin-clothed Jesus writhing languorously on the cross. They’re also quite aware of the frisson of pleasure that comes from the sight of celebrity in a provocative pose; they count Catherine Deneuve, Iggy Pop, Nina Hagen, Yves Saint-Laurent and porn legend Jeff Stryker among their subjects.
For thirty years, Pierre has been taking photographs and Gilles retouching them with paint. In contrast with the somewhat smooth quality of contemporary photography, the duo has invented a unique style and technique that extols an exuberant and ornamental material and glorifies the models, transforming them into timeless icons.
You can read more about the artists here, here, and here. There’s also more about the lover-artists and more of their delicious photos after the jump!

The artists have evolved a workable means of producing their labor-intensive pictures, artisan style, in their home and studio in the suburbs of Paris. They live on the upper floor and have their studio in the basement — like a micro version of a Hollywood studio in a residential neighborhood. Though both admit to the youthful influence of Tinseltown narrative and design magic, they don’t appear to be caught up in it. Nor do their neighbors. “The neighbors peek out when stars show up for a shoot,” Gilles says, “but people don’t pay us much note. It’s France, after all.”
While they conceive the images together, Pierre is more of a photographer and shoots the black-and-white and color shots that serve as their base images, while Gilles is the painter who touches up the pictures with pastel-colored dots that create the illusion of sparkles. “We do everything ourselves,” they say. That includes constructing the elaborate sets of forests, ice palaces or heavenly fields of grass, setting up the lights and posing their models.
They’re on record for their lack of interest in digital set building or retouching. “We like to work hands-on,” Pierre says. “We like for the model to be in the middle of the set. There are more surprises, like in theater. It takes longer but it’s more real for us.”