Ecce Homo by Fernando Bayona
The work Ecce Homo by F. Bayona (2017) is a visually lush and symbolically dense piece that combines photography and digital collage techniques to construct an allegorical universe where the male body becomes the center of a complex narrative about history, power, spirituality, and human fragility. The image originates from an original photograph by artist F. Bayona, which has been intervened by Ramón Tormes, an artist specialized in collage and photo retouching, known for recontextualizing pre-existing images within scenarios loaded with iconographic references and decorative elements.
Printed using chromogenic technique and measuring 78 x 78 cm (90.5 x 90.5 cm framed), the work features a nude man in a contracted, almost fetal position, seated on a terrestrial globe that directly evokes classical allegories of the world and dominion. His pose, which conveys both tension and surrender, is framed by an architecture reminiscent of Renaissance cloisters, while a garland of leaves and natural elements surrounds the central scene, in a composition that recalls both medieval tapestries and devotional frames.
The title Ecce Homo—a Latin phrase meaning “Behold the man”, uttered by Pontius Pilate according to the Gospel of John when presenting Jesus before his crucifixion—introduces a sacred, yet critical, reading of the representation of the male body as an object of contemplation, sacrifice, or desire. In this case, the body is not merely beautiful: it is vulnerable, almost penitent, and serves as a metaphor for the human condition—exposed and judged. Ramón Tormes constructs a setting where art history, religious culture, and homoerotic aesthetics converge to propose a sophisticated visual discourse.
The square frame is populated by numerous decorative and symbolic elements: magnified insects (scarabs, ants, jewel beetles), fruits, weapons, feathers, eyes, and a rhythmic sequence of anatomical fragments—arms, torsos, legs—which function as a visual frieze and evoke the fragmented body. The repetition of these motifs creates an almost liturgical rhythm and transforms the flat image space into a kind of digital reliquary. The inclusion of a monkey, laurel leaves, columns, and Gothic vaults suggests a historicist, archaeological, or even encyclopedic reading, akin to a Baroque cabinet of curiosities.
The piece strongly aligns itself with a genealogy of artists such as Domenico Gnoli, Mark Beard, and Rinaldo Hopf, who have challenged the classical and Christian canon from a queer perspective, reformulating Western iconography to include new sensibilities, bodies, and narratives. Tormes’s gesture is deliberate: he appropriates the sacred, the symbolic, and the decorative to build a contemporary language that challenges traditional categories of the masculine, the divine, and the beautiful.
Ecce Homo by F. Bayona is, ultimately, a visual meditation on the vulnerability of the body, the construction of icons, and aesthetics as a space for resistance and cultural reinterpretation. Tormes, true to his style, transforms the image into a device of memory, eroticism, and reflection, where past and present engage in a carefully orchestrated dialogue.
