Exploring the Sublime Tension Between Possession and Loss in Bart Julius Peters’ New Exhibition at Camera Doppia
words MATTIA MARCASSA BARBIERI
What happens when desire is perpetually deferred? When the body—so present, so tactile—remains just out of reach? Bart Julius Peters’ latest exhibition, With All Worldly Beings, housed within a site-specific installation by Massimo Faion at Camera Doppia, probes the erotic tension of what cannot be fully possessed. Like Pasolini’s enigmatic guest in Teorema, whose presence both electrifies and unsettles, Peters’s images elicit an unsatisfied longing, an invitation that never quite materializes.
Rather than sanctifying spirituality, With All Worldly Beings reframes sex itself as a form of sacrality—an ungraspable energy that transcends the physical, existing in the liminal space between attraction and alienation. Through his masterful manipulation of light, texture, and composition, Peters constructs a parallel universe where the ordinary is imbued with charged significance. A discarded chair, a withering flower, a classical bust—each element in his frame carries an erotic undertone, an implicit gesture toward the rituals of desire that shape our interactions with objects, people, and spaces.
The Seduction of the Imaginary
Peters has blurred the lines between the tangible and the illusory for over thirty years. In his lens, the art world’s fetishization of objects mirrors the dynamics of sex cruising—where a fleeting glance, a subtle gesture, or an ambiguous setting can signify an entire narrative of longing. Here, the image functions as both an object of desire and an elusive specter, refusing full disclosure. Nothing is entirely real, yet nothing is entirely fiction.
The exhibition unfolds like an intimate chamber, charged with latent sensuality. Faion’s site-specific design enhances this interplay of presence and absence, crafting an environment that amplifies Peters’ recurring themes: the erotic capital of the male form, the allure of the fleeting, and the tension between exhibition and concealment. His imagery evokes an opulence that is never ostentatious—a sensuality that hovers just beneath the surface, waiting to be deciphered.
Sex as Spectacle, Sex as Disruption
Like Teorema, With All Worldly Beings interrogates the power of desire to fracture social order. Pasolini’s intruder does not seduce; he simply exists, radiating a force that shatters the bourgeois façade. Peters’s photography operates on a similar wavelength, refusing to provide easy gratification. His homoerotic imagery—an open-legged pose, the soft curve of a pear, the burst of water from a Versailles fountain—teeters between provocation and abstraction. The works suggest pleasure yet deny immediate access, forcing the viewer into a state of suspended longing.
By placing art history in dialogue with contemporary queer aesthetics, Peters dismantles conventional visual codes. His male subjects embody both strength and fragility, oscillating between objectification and self-possession. A fisherman’s sunburnt back becomes an altar of youthful vigor; a carefully arranged bouquet morphs into a translucent, dreamlike apparition. Even the most mundane elements—an unremarkable stone, a forgotten piece of furniture—are transformed into objects of insatiable desire. This is the essence of Peters’ world: a reality in flux, where beauty is always on the verge of disappearing.
A Queer Domesticity
Set within the conceptual frame of Camera Doppia, an ephemeral exhibition space that champions queer perspectives, With All Worldly Beings reconstructs the domestic realm as a site of ambiguity. Here, home is not a place of comfort but a stage for erotic tension. The works on display, spanning from the mid-2000s to today, showcase Peters’s ability to conjure an atmosphere where personal memory, art-historical references, and sexual undertones collapse into one another.
Yet, the exhibition leaves us with an unresolved question: Is this aestheticized longing a form of liberation or another kind of entrapment? Are we witnessing an embrace of desire or its ultimate commodification? Like the final scene of Teorema, in which the father stands naked in the void, screaming into the abyss, Peters’ work lingers in a state of unresolved intensity—forever circling, never arriving.
In a world obsessed with possession, With All Worldly Beings reminds us of the erotic power of what remains just beyond our grasp.
