A pair of leather-clad men kiss beneath a tangle of barbed wire. Around them, pink stars, cartoon smiles, a slice of pizza, a sneaker, a skull, rainbows and fragments of warning signage collide in a riot of turquoise, black, pink and electric red. It feels playful, confrontational and a little dangerous, like stumbling across a queer fever dream pasted onto the wall of a city street. That tension is central to the work of Ben Youdan, a Liverpool-based visual artist whose handmade mixed-media pieces turn popular imagery, fetish culture, sexuality and queer identity into something loud, physical and impossible to ignore.

For SNIFF Scent 3, that energy feels right at home.

Youdan's work refuses to sit comfortably inside a single medium. Photography might provide the body, but illustration interrupts it. Paint adds another layer. Collage tears the image apart and rebuilds it. Stickers, glitter, printed material, graphic symbols and found visual language become part of the vocabulary. The finished pieces can look digitally chaotic at first glance, but the physicality of the process is important. As Ben Youdan describes it, his work is a handmade product of the digital age, a response to the way we experience images, identity and culture through an increasingly saturated media landscape.

And sex is very much part of that landscape.

There is an unapologetic physicality to Ben Youdan's imagery. Men are not presented as distant objects of desire. Leather, fetish gear, masculinity, bodies and sexual expression become active ingredients in the work, mixed together with humour, colour and visual noise.

That matters because Youdan's relationship with queer imagery isn't simply about making something erotic. His work repeatedly asks what happens when the things queer culture has historically been told to hide are dragged into the light and celebrated instead.

His 2019–2020 exhibition Filth, developed following his artist residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, focused directly on queer male sexuality, leather and fetish subculture. During his residency, Youdan connected with members of the Los Angeles Leather community and created a series of mixed-media portraits that subsequently developed into the Liverpool exhibition. His stated intention was to celebrate male beauty, the male form and its erotic nature while questioning assumptions surrounding masculinity.

That history is visible in the work featured in SNIFF Scent 3.

The men are masculine, but the image doesn't treat masculinity as something fixed or solemn. It is dressed up, fetishised, sexualised, disrupted and surrounded by visual jokes. A leather uniform can signify authority, submission, sexuality, community or performance, sometimes all at once. The familiar symbols of fetish culture become raw material for an artist who understands that erotic imagery can carry cultural meaning as well as sexual charge.

There is also something wonderfully mischievous about it.

A warning sign declaring that public sexual behaviour is an offence sits alongside two men kissing. Barbed wire frames the composition while cheerful cartoon smiles float through the background. The contradiction is deliberate. Authority and pleasure. Restriction and freedom. Danger and play.

That collision is where Ben Youdan does some of his most interesting work.

Youdan's images operate almost like a visual playlist, pulling fragments from completely different cultural frequencies and forcing them into the same frame.

His practice incorporates collage, drawing, painting, printmaking and photography, while his influences range from popular culture and urban ephemera to punk, anti-establishment imagery and the traditions of Western art. His own description of the work centres on juxtaposition, using apparently disconnected elements to construct a new visual language around queer identity, individualism and the appropriation of space.

Look closely at the SNIFF Scent 3 image and that approach becomes obvious.

The leather men are photographic and tactile. Their bodies have weight. The clothing catches light. The kiss gives the image its emotional and erotic centre. Around them, however, reality begins to fracture. Graphic stars burst across the surface. Cartoon faces grin back at the viewer. A skull gleams like a piece of fetish jewellery. A sneaker floats in the background. Barbed wire cuts across everything.

It is messy by design.

But it isn't accidental.

The layers create a kind of visual interference, the same way our feeds, phones, advertising, memes, pornography, news, political messaging and personal photographs now occupy the same digital space. Ben Youdan takes that overwhelming contemporary image culture and drags it back into the physical world, turning screen-age clutter into handmade art.

The result has the immediate impact of street art and the intimacy of something made by hand.

Fetish imagery has always existed in a complicated relationship with visibility. Leather men, rubber, uniforms and other forms of sexual subculture can be instantly recognisable to those who know the codes, while remaining strange or even threatening to outsiders.

Youdan isn't interested in sanding those edges down.

His work embraces the visual language of fetish culture and puts it front and centre. That doesn't mean every image needs to be read literally as sexual. Instead, the fetish becomes part of a larger conversation about masculinity, identity, performance and freedom.

In Mask, exhibited at the Williamson Art Gallery as part of the Independents Biennial in 2025, Youdan used a gas mask associated with fetish role-play and presented it in pink glitter. His explanation of the work focuses on agency, vulnerability and the ability of people to express sexuality on their own terms. The piece deliberately challenges the darker assumptions a mainstream viewer might bring to fetish imagery. 

That is an important thread running through Ben Youdan's practice. The work can be sexy, funny, confrontational and visually excessive, but underneath all that noise is a consistent belief in queer people occupying space without having to make themselves smaller.

That philosophy has also found its way into public art. In 2021, Youdan created Queer With No Fear for Homotopia's Queer the City exhibition in Liverpool. The work was subsequently vandalised and destroyed, an incident Merseyside Police treated as a hate crime.

The title now feels particularly revealing. Queerness in Youdan's work isn't presented as something requiring permission.

It takes up space.

SNIFF exists in that uncomfortable space between art and desire, between the gallery and the underground, between queer culture as something to be archived and queer culture as something still being lived.

That makes Ben Youdan a natural fit for SNIFF Scent 3.

His work doesn't ask permission to be sexy. It doesn't apologise for leather or fetish. It doesn't separate sexuality from identity and pretend the two exist in different rooms. Instead, everything gets thrown onto the same canvas and allowed to fight for attention.

The result is colourful, horny, funny, political, handmade and unmistakably queer.

There is also something distinctly punk about it. Not punk as a costume, but punk as an attitude toward authority, convention and the expectation that art should behave itself.

In a Youdan image, a leather daddy can kiss another man beneath a sign warning against obscene behaviour while cartoon stars explode around them. That isn't subtle. It isn't supposed to be. And perhaps that is exactly why it works.

Ben Youdan makes queer art that knows desire can be joyful, absurd, political, funny and provocative at the same time. His imagery doesn't separate the erotic from the cultural conversation. It puts them together, layers them up, scratches across the surface and leaves the seams visible.

The work feels handmade because it is handmade. It feels contemporary because it understands how contemporary images are consumed. And it feels queer because it doesn't treat queerness as a subject sitting safely at a distance.

It is right there in the picture. In the leather. In the kiss. In the fetish. In the glitter. In the mess.

And in the unapologetic pleasure of being seen.

Ben Youdan is featured in SNIFF Scent 3, alongside a collection of artists exploring queer art, sexuality, fetish culture and the unruly edges of contemporary queer expression.