Armando Frezze Durand: Love Is The Only Cure

Armando Frezze Durand is an artist based in Buenos Aires. He focuses his work on the graphic study of masculinity by exploring and capturing the image of his closest environment and then materializing it in individual or collective samples, books, and short films.

Armando, tell us something about you and your Doopler Magazine. When did you start?

I begin by portraying close friends, and somehow collect their looks. At first I had a photo account in the red Flickr until one day they decided to close it. It is very probable that someone has denounced a male naked chest, until that time I had never made a male nude but I understood we were not close to naturalize the male beauty and after writing several times to the company without positive answers, I decided to create my own medium in which I can reflect this type of content. An space with place for not only the stereotype of muscular man, but the guy on the door on one side, who usually does not like be photographed.

Nudity and pictures of body and sexuality is a double-edged sword. Have you ever experienced that your audience completely misunderstood your intentions – and what did this do to your way of taking pictures?

Many times it is not understood the nudity nor the selection of the models. Last month a german magazine wrote promoting my show in Berlin and commenting on my work they decontextualized a phrase that I had said in an interview where I commented that usually photographed guys of approximately 60 kilos, for them this was to leave many people of side, for me it was the opposite, it was the possibility that guys who usually do not have much security about their image have a chance to look beautiful. The thinness and I say it from personal experience can be much more traumatic than people imagine and much of my work attempts to break those aesthetic paradigms.

Container Love’s mission is to highlight the beauty in diversity, to change points of view, and stand up for more tolerance with the help of pictures and basses. Which part does remind you of yourself? Which statements are hidden behind your works?

Love is the only cure for everything, and love begins with us, the idea of accepting ourselves will make us accept all who are somehow different. I work with very diverse people in every project, not only in their economic and social context but also with people of different sexual choices. I like to feel that I contribute in some way to inspire more flexibility. Celebrate diversity as a right of all.

What are upcoming projects, that you are currently working on?

My last project is called Apocryphal Messengers and I have present it in NYC and now in June I will present it in Berlin at the Berlin Blue Art Gallery, and I am already working on a new series of mixed technique that will work on personal reflexes.

Thank you, Armando.

Check out Apocryphal Messengers on Container Love’ Editorial.

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