Ramón Tormes: Allen King by Mano Martínez
The work Allen King by Mano Martínez (2016) is a refined and provocative piece of contemporary art that fuses photography and digital collage, resulting in a powerful image where eroticism, religious iconography, and queer aesthetics intertwine with subtle irony and ornamental beauty. The composition originates from an original photograph by artist Mano Martínez, known for his work with male models in carefully constructed settings that explore sensuality and intimacy. The image of the young Allen King — an iconic figure in gay adult cinema — was taken by Martínez and later digitally transformed by Ramón Tormes, a visual artist specializing in collage and photo retouching, who reimagines the portrait as a symbolically rich and formally complex scene.
Using chromogenic print techniques, Tormes reconfigures the model’s body — nude, idealized, almost marble-like — placing it within a celestial visual universe: white angel wings extend from his back, while a sky of soft clouds and flying birds envelops him. The entire composition is framed by a floral tondo reminiscent of both religious stained glass windows and Renaissance portraiture. The body’s beauty is not only exalted but sacralized, shifting the viewer’s gaze from the pornographic to the mystical in a visual play loaded with cultural and emotional references.
Tormes’s signature collage technique is not merely decorative here, but an expressive language with conceptual depth. The meticulously cut flowers — lilies, roses, daisies, irises — add a baroque texture that, far from seeking realism, constructs a deliberately kitsch aesthetic, echoing the traditions of artists such as Pierre et Gilles or David LaChapelle. This hyperbolic and openly queer style transforms the image into an altar of homoerotic desire — a visual celebration of the flesh framed in poetic and devotional terms.
The work fits into a genealogy of male body representations where sacred art, fashion photography, gay cinema, and contemporary collage converge. Tormes displays his technical skill in digital manipulation and his sensitivity to generate images that, while appealing to desire, also invite symbolic and cultural interpretation. His artistic practice is marked by the appropriation and elevation of preexisting photographs through a unique visual language, blending composition, color, and visual excess with a critical lens on canon, gender, and identity.
Allen King by Mano Martínez is not only a portrait or aesthetic exercise, but a visual manifesto on beauty, queer embodiment, and the possibility of symbolic redemption through the image. Ultimately, it is a work where eroticism and spirituality do not clash, but coexist in the same visual space with intensity and grace.
