Pleasure Principle
In Pleasure Principle, Jock Thomson expands his ongoing interrogation of the queer body, desire, and the aesthetics of transgression. Through a tactile fusion of photography, print, and sculpture, the exhibition offers a vivid and visceral encounter with the body- not only as image but as material, site, and provocation.
Central to the exhibition are Thomson’s signature CMYK screenprinted photographs on latex, stretched taut over custom metal frames. These lurid, fleshly surfaces depict charged scenes of queer intimacy, their glossy, pliable materiality lending them a bodily presence. DROP- a close-up of a man spitting into another man’s eye- encapsulates the tone of the show: confrontational, absurd, and laced with humour. It’s a moment that hovers between aggression and play, revulsion and eroticism, destabilising the viewer’s expectations of intimacy and spectacle.
Elsewhere, sculptural works take on a more literal corporeality: red wax casts of fists pierce through latex membranes, framed within steel structures shaped like an anus and a vulva. Referencing Leo Bersani’s seminal essay Is the Rectum a Grave?, these works interrogate the politics of penetration, gendered anatomy, and the cultural fear of queer pleasure. They refuse the sanitised or symbolic in favour of the raw, the explicit, the unresolved.
Thomson’s practice draws equally from fashion, fetish, and fine art photography, collapsing distinctions between high and low, public and private, erotic and aesthetic. Through flash-lit snapshots and sculptural interventions, he builds a world where queerness is not marginal or metaphorical, but insistently present- sensual, excessive, and rigorously composed.
Pleasure Principle is not a manifesto, but an invitation: into a space where sex is both serious and surreal, where the body is fragmented but never passive, and where pleasure is treated not as indulgence, but as principle.
