LA ISLA

La Isla began with a loss. In February 2024 Matu Buiatti lost Patricia — his aunt and closest friend — and, after fifteen years, stopped painting. He left for an island in the Paraná Delta. “My brush became a lens,” he wrote; “my canvas, a stranger I had never met.” Over the next eighteen months, from the Delta to the mountains of Córdoba, that grief turned into this book.

More than a project about the body, it is a project about encounter. Eleven young men — strangers until then — approached the camera through time, conversation, and trust. None had posed nude before; with some it took more than a year. The image was never the starting point — it was the consequence of a bond. Nudity appears here as a gesture of honesty, not spectacle, and those who never undressed are in the book too.

Made entirely with analog film and without digital retouching, La Isla can be read from a long history of male portraiture — from Bob Mizer's archives to the present — but also from something simpler: the possibility of showing oneself, and of being seen.

With texts by Argentine artist and art curator Carlos Herrera, and back-cover words by New York-based Russian-American artist and author Slava Mogutin.