Tag Archives: Male Art

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Love on Beach 21: Alexy Berthelot


Alexy Berthelot has a thing for series. His Beach Boys and Meditation collections, often organised around numbered themes, move away from the idea of the individual portrait. Instead, his figures become archetypes: familiar, almost dreamlike presences that feel less like people being observed and more like moments we’ve somehow stepped into.

A self-taught artist based in Geneva, Berthelot moves between figurative art, abstraction and surrealism, creating an intimate, highly aesthetic universe. His work feels poetic and imaginative, with a particular fascination for masculine beauty, intimacy and vulnerability. There’s something quietly compelling about the way he explores the male form without sacrificing its softness. Beauty, here, doesn’t need to shout.

This painting brings together three young men, seen from behind as they walk into the sea. It’s a classic composition, but one that works beautifully. Standing side by side, they draw us into their world, placing us just behind them, looking out at the same horizon. We’re not observing them so much as joining them for a moment.

They’re caught mid-stride, their feet breaking through the shallow surf. The subtle alternation of heels and legs creates an easy, almost musical rhythm, carrying the eye gently from one figure to the next. Nothing feels forced. It’s movement without urgency, a little slice of summer that seems to exist outside time.

The figures seem almost incandescent against the sea, their warmth intensified by the coolness surrounding them. You can practically feel the heat, hear the gentle wash of the water and imagine the sand beneath your feet.

It’s a painting about bodies, certainly, but also about atmosphere, companionship and that fleeting moment when the world seems to slow down. Three boys, the open sea, the sun on their skin.

What’s not to love?

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Després del somni (After the Dream): Nil Masip Boget (2025)


It makes you sick, doesn’t it?

Here’s someone who is only twenty years old, extremely good looking — and, annoyingly, an amazing artist too.

Barcelona-based Nil Masip Boget is a classical and figurative painter who trained at the Barcelona Academy of Art and Acadèmia La Gràcia. He has already won several awards, and his work is now held in public and private collections across Europe and the USA. He has also just had his first solo exhibition, sense por d’oblidar, at Inéditad Gallery in Barcelona.

He works mainly in oils, using light, colour and texture to create paintings that feel quiet and introspective. There is often a sense of silence in his work — moments caught somewhere between thought, memory and dream.

Després del somni (After the Dream) was the last oil painting he completed for Happiness Journey, a contemporary art exhibition held in Barcelona last year.

It shows a shirtless young man sitting on a bed, wrapped in crumpled white sheets. He looks away from us, towards the right of the canvas, while a mirror on the far left gives us a second, more distant view of him.

It is a beautifully strange composition. The dark background seems to remove the outside world altogether, leaving the boy suspended in some private, timeless space between sleep and waking. The mirror adds another layer — self-reflection, vulnerability, perhaps even the feeling of watching yourself from outside your own body.

Enough of the art criticism.

What actually caught my eye about this painting?

I shall leave you to guess.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Reclining Boy: Eugene Shako

Reclining Boy was featured at the VCRB Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium, as part of Eugene Shako’s collective exhibition titled Silent Narratives, which ran from April 28 to June 7, 2026. 

Stillness.
Closed eyes.
Wet hair.
Bare skin.
The world rushing around him.
He doesn’t seem to care.
There is something beautiful about that.
Perhaps it is the vulnerability.
Perhaps it is the arrogance of youth.
Or perhaps
I simply want to lie beside him
and watch the world disappear.

There’s something about Shadko’s paintings that blurs reality with imagination.

The longer I look, the more I see.

And sometimes I wonder if I am seeing something that nobody else sees.

Shadko is a Belarusian artist living and working in Warsaw. His paintings begin with images — photographs, social media, something glimpsed online, something that catches his eye. He takes these fragments and passes them through himself. He studies them. Distorts them. Reimagines them.

Nothing remains quite as it was.

His paintings are often about faces and bodies. Youth. Vulnerability. Isolation. That strange fragility of adolescence.

His figures seem to exist somewhere outside reality. Alone. Spotlighted. Suspended in an imaginary world.

And perhaps that is what draws me in.

The feeling that there is something just beneath the surface.

Something I can see.

Something you might not.

Shadko studied at the Glebov Art College in Minsk and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.

Hot Boys, Great Art

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Troye Sivan: Sam McKinniss (2026)


The things that you discover.

Like, I didn’t know that Troye Sivan is really called Troye Sivan Mellet. That Sivan is the ninth month of the Hebrew calendar, usually falling in May or June, and that he was born in June — on 7 Sivan, as it happens.

And I still think he is a ‘dirty’ boy.

As far as art is concerned, Sivan has now popped up on the cover of the latest issue of CULTURED magazine, painted by American artist Sam McKinniss, who also interviewed him for the issue. The result is this rather gorgeous, slightly feverish portrait — and surely some magazine covers are destined to become collector’s items.

McKinniss, born in 1985 and based in New York, has been described as an ‘artist of celebrity’, having painted figures from popular culture and created the cover for Lorde’s Melodrama (2017), arguably one of his most memorable commissions.

He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005 before going on to exhibit throughout the United States and Europe. His paintings can veer from celebrity portraiture to lush, pop-cultural fantasy, with the occasional reclining male nude thrown in for good measure.

McKinniss first discovered Sivan on Instagram, when the then twenty-year-old had just released Blue Neighbourhood. He came across him again in 2018, when he saw Sivan in Joel Edgerton’s conversion-therapy drama Boy Erased. McKinniss remembered being impressed that someone from the pop world would take part in such a difficult and necessary film.

And now, years later, he has painted him.

Which, when you think about it, seems entirely appropriate.