Sick Bacchus:A Grindr Love Story

Sick Bacchus brings the old vanitas tradition into the era of geosocial networking, where intimacy, desire, risk, beauty, and self-presentation now move at unprecedented speed.

The work takes Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus as a point of departure, reimagining its languor, sensuality, and memento mori through a contemporary queer lens. The model’s own life gave the piece an unexpected gravity: after their separation, his first love contracted HIV during a period marked by drug use and digitally mediated encounters.

Rather than condemning the technology or the desire it facilitates, the work considers the more complicated terrain created when ancient human appetites meet new forms of access: how quickly longing can become connection, performance, escape, intimacy, or risk, and how difficult it can be to separate one from the other.