Baroque Shadows and Leather Light: Orpheus in SNIFF Magazine, Scent 1

Mark Dunn
2025-12-13T02:34:00-08:00

An academic oil painter based in Southern England, Orpheus has spent years quietly producing some of the most formally rigorous, emotionally charged, and sexually explicit gay art being made anywhere in the world today. Now, with his inclusion in the debut issue of SNIFF magazine — Scent 1, that work has found exactly the home it deserves.

A New Kind of Queer Publication

SNIFF is a bold, subversive publication that blurs the line between queer fine art and fetish culture. Conceived as a sanctuary for uncensored queer expression in a world still policed by censorship and conformity, it celebrates artists who work fearlessly in the erotic underground.

Published by The Male Muse Publishing — the team behind Inspiró, each issue features a curated blend of photography, painting, illustration, and experimental modalities, revealing the raw and unfiltered beauty of desire in all its forms, from bondage and role play to fetish gear, sneakers, and the worship of feet. SNIFF challenges respectability politics and sanitised ideas of art by reclaiming the erotic as both personal and political.

Scent One — the debut issue, also features exclusive interviews with Spanish fetish photographer Abraham Saraya and Master Bearded Koldo, a respected figure within leather and BDSM communities, alongside original queer erotica by author Lawrence Schimel and multidisciplinary artist J Davies. The issue has been released in both print and digital formats, with the digital edition expanded with over 100 additional images, content considered too explicit, too raw, or simply too hot for print.

It is, in short, a magazine built for artists like Orpheus.

The Man Behind the Myth

Orpheus works in oil on canvas, using the same materials and techniques as the Old Masters. His canvases draw their compositions and dramatic lighting directly from the Baroque painters of the 17th century — Caravaggio, Rubens, Bernini — and yet their subject matter is resolutely, unapologetically contemporary: highly charged scenes of gay sex that simultaneously evoke the aesthetics of the modern fetish scene and a yearning, almost aching, longing for intimacy and connection.

It is a combination that shouldn't work on paper, and is devastating in practice.

The origins of this aesthetic tension are biographical. Orpheus grew up in the suburbs of the English Midlands during the era of AIDS and Section 28, a period of profound institutional hostility toward gay life in Britain. Homosexuality was not visible, not discussed, and certainly not celebrated. During a teenage stay in Paris, something shifted. Roaming the halls of the Louvre, he became obsessed with historical art, its weight, its drama, its willingness to render the body as a site of both spiritual and erotic intensity. He would carry that obsession for the rest of his life.

What followed was an unlikely detour: two decades as an international civil servant, working across Asia and the Middle East. The experience deepened the sense of displacement and repressed desire that permeates every canvas he has made since, the feeling of being an outsider, of wanting what one is not permitted to name.

The Work

Visiting his website at orpheusmenart.com, the impact of his paintings is immediate. The gallery presents work that is lush, technically accomplished, and confrontationally explicit. The chiaroscuro is Caravaggesque, deep blacks, warm golden flesh tones, light that seems to fall from somewhere just outside the frame. The bodies are rendered with academic precision, the scenes with dramatic, almost theatrical staging. And yet there is nothing museum-safe about what is happening within them. These are unambiguous paintings of gay men, of leather and desire, of pleasure and longing held in the same breath.

This is what makes Orpheus unusual, even among artists working in queer erotic traditions. He is not illustrating gay life, he is painting it with the same seriousness, the same formal apparatus, that Rubens brought to biblical martyrdom. The implicit argument is clear: this desire is as worthy of monumentalising as any subject in the Western canon.

A Residency at the Tom of Finland Foundation

The institutional recognition has followed. Orpheus has exhibited his work in London, the USA, and Canada, and in spring 2025 he was artist in residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, one of the most significant honours available to an artist working at the intersection of gay culture and fine art. The Foundation, which exists to preserve and promote art that celebrates gay male sexuality and erotic culture, is a natural spiritual home for work of this kind.

Why This Matters

There is a tendency, even within queer spaces, to treat the explicitly erotic and the formally serious as mutually exclusive categories, as though desire disqualifies a work from being considered art. Orpheus refuses that distinction entirely, and SNIFF magazine exists to publish exactly that refusal.

For readers discovering both for the first time through Scent 1, it is an introduction to something rare: work that has genuine art-historical ambition, that carries the weight of a specific queer biography, and that refuses to make itself comfortable or palatable to those who would rather look away.

SNIFF, Scent 1 is available now in print and digital formats from The Male Muse store. You can explore Orpheus's work at orpheusmenart.com and follow him on Instagram at @orpheusmen_art.