Exposed body and melancholy of the trail: Joy Majdalani and Robert Mapplethorpe

A single art

The work Jimmy Freeman Joy Majdalani's (2025), published in the prestigious "un seul art" series of the Centre Pompidou, is far more than a mere analysis of images or a biographical sketch of Robert Mapplethorpe. It unfolds as a literary and aesthetic meditation in which the boundaries between the narrator's biography, art theory, and immediate physical experience blur. Majdalani, born in Beirut in 1992, uses photography Jimmy Freeman (1981) as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of seeing, the power of transgression, and the construction of masculinity. The book series, a collaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the publisher Grasset, was launched in April 2025 under the direction of Charles Dantzig to ensure the museum's presence during its five-year renovation (2025–2030) as part of the "Constellation" program. The series' approach breaks with traditional art historical formats: instead of scholarly analyses, contemporary writers engage in a subjective, literary dialogue with iconic works from the collection (such as those by Matisse or, in this case, Mapplethorpe). The title "a single art" underscores the conviction that literature and visual art are not separate spheres but form an aesthetic unity, with the book itself acting as a mobile exhibition space that carries the artworks beyond the walls of the closed museum and into the hands of the readers.

Communication in the book takes place on different levels. Conversations in the classical sense are rare. Nonverbal forms of communication are more important: the gaze, the pose, the silence. In the studio scenes, the gaze often replaces language. A raised chin, a change in posture suffices to convey instructions. When language is used, it often appears reduced, fragmentary, almost functional. This linguistic restraint reflects the concentration of the photographic moment. The narrator writes, words in space "fall flat," while the body speaks. Communication shifts to the level of perception. Alongside this, there exists a reflective form of communication, expressed in the narrator's inner monologue. It is addressed neither to Mapplethorpe nor to Jimmy, but to the image itself. This silent address lends the text a meditative quality.

The text can be divided into several interwoven narrative strands. The first strand concerns Mapplethorpe's work itself: the arrangement of bodies, the selection of motifs, the aesthetic discipline of the photographic process. These passages are highly scenic and conveyed through a precise visual language. Robert Mapplethorpe occupies a key position within 20th-century art. His photography combined the male nude, homosexual desire, and sadomasochistic imagery with a formal rigor that both provoked and canonized. His works stand at the intersection of classical composition and radical body politics. Therefore, any literary text dedicated to this work inevitably involves grappling with questions of visibility, power, desire, and aestheticization. The book unfolds as a series of scenes, memories, and reflections revolving around Mapplethorpe, the model Jimmy Freeman, and the narrator herself. It describes moments in the studio, photographic sessions, glimpses of individual images, conversations, silences, and later, illness and loss. These fragments combine to form a poetic meditation on art, the body, and transience.

A second narrative thread revolves around Jimmy Freeman. He appears as a young man, as a model, as a physical presence in the studio, and later increasingly as a memory. His biography remains fragmentary; the narrative focuses primarily on his appearance in the eyes of others. Freeman forms a hinge between art and life. He is a model, lover, friend, but also a projection screen for desires, fears, and aesthetic ideals. Jimmy is present less as a psychologically developed figure than as the embodiment of a principle: youth, beauty, transience. His existence is inextricably linked to the artist's gaze—to be seen means both recognition and vulnerability for him. The text subtly addresses this asymmetry without resorting to moralistic simplification. Jimmy is neither a victim nor autonomous in the emphatic sense. He exists in the tension between self-assertion and aesthetic appropriation. This is precisely where the tragedy of the figure lies: his beauty is simultaneously his power and his vulnerability.

A third thread concerns the narrator. She is always involved in the scenes without pushing herself to the forefront. Her perspective is characterized by a controlled intimacy. In a key scene, she recounts a shared stay in a studio. While Mapplethorpe works, she observes the transformation of the space: the silence, the concentration, the intensification of the atmosphere. She reflects on her encounters with the paintings, their conversations, her irritations, and her own position within the complex interplay of art and desire. This thread lends the book its essayistic dimension. The narrator comments, interprets, and questions without claiming interpretive authority. She inscribes herself into the text by revealing her perceptions, her physical presence, and her reactions to the paintings. Her biography appears fragmentary, hinted at through memories, stays, encounters, and an awareness of loss and mortality. In engaging with Mapplethorpe's work, her own experiences of desire, intimacy, and distance are condensed. At the same time, the text addresses autobiographical experience as a process of self-examination. The narrator continually reflects on her perspective, her participation in the aesthetic process, and the limits of her understanding. This stance points to an awareness of her own situatedness as a woman, as a writer, as a witness to a male-dominated art practice. The recurring question of what it means to look at bodies subjected to a desire that is not one's own structures this self-reflection.

Finally, a fourth narrative thread emerges, dealing with illness, mortality, and the afterlife of images. Robert Mapplethorpe's AIDS diagnosis does not constitute a biographical backdrop in the strict sense, but rather pervades the text as a shadowy presence that profoundly alters the perception of bodies. In retrospect, the previously described acts, poses, and gestures appear under the shadow of a threatened temporality. The bodies carry an urgency that only becomes fully legible with the knowledge of the illness. What initially appeared as a sovereign aesthetic statement takes on the character of a final flicker. From this perspective, beauty is experienced as a temporally limited intensity, as a condensation of life in the face of its end. The narrator describes how images become relics, traces of a body that is no longer present. The afterlife of the figures thus unfolds in the medium of art, which enables remembrance while simultaneously keeping the irretrievability of loss visible. Illness and death structure the end of the book as a quiet, sobering insight into the limits of aesthetic duration.

Medusa's gaze

In Joy Majdalani's interpretation, the male body is consistently transformed into a sculpture through Mapplethorpe's lens, firmly situating the work within the art historical tradition of ancient statuary and the Renaissance. The narrator repeatedly compares the physical presence of models like Jimmy Freeman or Ken Moody to materials such as stone, marble, or bronze, thereby removing the bodies from their everyday contingency and imbuing them with an almost sacred, timeless dignity. This "Medusa gaze" petrifies living flesh into a "plastic installation" in which anatomical details like the genitals are reinterpreted as architectural pedestals or pillars of a geometric composition. Mapplethorpe thus acts as a "sculptor of flesh," disciplining the bodies.

Despite this aesthetic fixation, an existential tension remains, since photography, while staging the body as an immobile monument, can never completely erase its inherent vulnerability and mortality. While a real sculpture made of stone suggests eternity, photography preserves only a "fragile trace" of a living organism, which remains exposed to decay and "decay." Majdalani describes this process as an attempt to preempt death through its aesthetic anticipation, forcing the body into the immobility of a work of art while still alive. Ultimately, it is precisely the relentless sharpness of the camera that reveals the frailty of matter, transforming the sculptural pose into something melancholic. Memento died This emphasizes the gap between the imperishability of art and the finiteness of human existence.

The book's early passages establish photography as a staged event. A recurring constellation is the moment before the shot: the positioning of the body, the adjustment of the light, the brief pause before pressing the shutter. These situations are imbued with a peculiar tension, oscillating between movement and stillness. The narrator describes how Mapplethorpe orders the space, positions the body, and fixes the gaze. The photographic act thus acquires an almost ritualistic quality. In the text, a shot is varied, slightly shifted, and revisited. The text employs repetition and minimal alteration. This creates a dense aesthetic structure that slows down the reading experience and sharpens the perception. A scene often ends abruptly, without resolution. This openness points to the limitations of any representation. The text consciously acknowledges that images show more than can be said. Therein lies its literary strength. The narrative follows a serial logic that mimics the rhythm of a darkroom: scenes emerge from the blackness of memory, are fixed by the light of language, and remain as melancholic traces.

In a pivotal scene, it is stated, in essence, that the body already knows what is demanded of it, even before the photographer speaks. This anticipation points to an aesthetic disciplining: the body enters into a relationship with the camera characterized by expectation, adaptation, and tacit consent. Photography here appears as the art of decision. The moment is selected, isolated, and imbued with meaning. The structure of these scenes often follows a clear dramatic arc: preparation – tension – standstill. The language slows down, the sentences become shorter, the descriptions more precise. This formal intensification transfers the photographic effect into the literary structure. The text itself begins to "expose."

Jimmy Freeman From the outset, this is less a novel in the traditional sense than a poetic-essayistic exploration of art, life, and desire. Photography appears not merely as a medium of representation, but as an existential practice, a mode of being-in-the-world. Robert Mapplethorpe is not primarily portrayed biographically, but as a nexus of aesthetic energies. The narrator reflects on photography as an art form that simultaneously fixes and exposes, immortalizes and wounds. Mapplethorpe's images "don't record reality, they provoke it," as the text suggests: they create reality by radicalizing it. Central to this is the tension between surface and depth. The highly polished formal rigor of the photographs—the interplay of black and white, of symmetry and light—contrasts with the violence, desire, and vulnerability of the bodies. The narrator interprets this aesthetic as an ethical stance: for Mapplethorpe, beauty is never innocent, but always the result of a decision, a transgression of boundaries. In this sense, photography becomes the art of risk.

In Majdalani's interpretation, photography is not a passive medium of representation, but a radical act that not only registers reality but compels it to take on a form. Mapplethorpe appears here as a "mage," a magician who orders the world through rigorous rituals. The photographic act is described as an event that oscillates between movement and stillness, bringing space, light, and the body into a precarious equilibrium. This aesthetic disciplining lends the moment an almost sacred quality, removing it from the arbitrariness of everyday life and transforming it into the timelessness of art.

This becomes particularly clear in the narrator's reflection on her sadistic primal scene, in which she sees her own literary calling as grounded in the power to order situations and bodies according to her own will. Literature, analogous to photography, is understood here as an act of conquest.

The writing and the fantasy émanent pour my source of the message. J'exerce mon omnipotence. Je fais se dérouler jusqu'au bout des scénarios hypothétiques — d'abord vagues, ils se densifient et se précisent. The contingents are necessary. It's so intense that it's really effective. Ils font sécession, fondent leur propre république.

Writing and imagination spring from the same source for me. I exercise my omnipotence. I play out hypothetical scenarios to their logical conclusion—at first vaguely, then they become denser and more precise. Chance occurrences become necessities. They are so intense that reality disintegrates. They split off and found their own republic.

In this passage, Majdalani inextricably links the writing process with the omnipotence of the phantasm. The analysis shows that for the narrator, writing is not mere reflection, but the creation of an autonomous reality (“propre république”) that replaces the real as soon as it “unravels” (s'effilocheThe word "omnipotence" underscores the artist's claim to power over their material—be it words or bodies. The transformation of the accidental (contingents) into the necessary describes the core of the aesthetic transformation: The image or the text no longer tolerates any alternative; they take the place of the disordered world as absolute truth.

The narrator reveals sadistic fantasies from her childhood, in which she imagined omnipotence over a naked and submissive man imprisoned in a cellar, testing her own efficacy in the absence of male figures. This secret ritual served as an exclusive space for her omnipotence, where she tormented her imaginary prisoner with unpredictability and humiliation, which she now understands as the true origin of her literary practice. She recognizes these dynamics of violence and control in the aesthetics of Robert Mapplethorpe: photography is described as an act of conquest in which the model accepts "absolute submission" to the artist's gaze in order to enter art history as a "plastic installation." Dominance in the work is not understood as purely one-sided, but as a complex aesthetic network in which total surrender can paradoxically lead to a form of power and pleasure, while ultimately all participants—whether dominant or submissive—remain subject to the tyranny of the photographic gaze.

Anatomy of Submission

Jimmy Freeman appears in many scenes as a physically present figure: laughing, silent, posing. At the same time, his portrayal is characterized by an increasing absence. The further the text progresses, the more Jimmy becomes a memory, an image. In one particularly poignant scene, the narrator describes a moment after a photo shoot. Jimmy sits exhausted on the floor, the lights already out, the camera put away. This scene is unspectacular, almost incidental. Its function lies in disenchanting the artistic moment. The body returns to time, to weariness and heaviness. The structure of this passage is strikingly simple. Short main clauses, few metaphors, a sober observation. Here, Jimmy appears as a human being beyond the realm of aesthetic constructs, vulnerable and finite.

A central theme of the book is the consistent objectification of men. Majdalani breaks with the traditional regime of the gaze by staging the male body—especially the Black body in Mapplethorpe's work—not as a subject of action, but as a surface of desire and as a sculptural mass. Unlike in traditional, heteronormatively coded visual regimes, man is the object of the gaze. The narrator insists on the materiality of these bodies: muscles, skin, and genitals appear not symbolically veiled, but frontally, sometimes brutally, visible. It is precisely therein, however, that their aesthetic dignity lies. Mapplethorpe's photography transforms the male body into a sculpture and simultaneously deprives it of any idealization. In the narrator's description, Jimmy Freeman's body becomes a "plastic installation." His humanity recedes behind geometric perfection; he becomes an architecture of muscles, skin, and tendons.

Homosexual desire is not psychologized, but aesthetically structured. It manifests itself in lines, tensions, and contrasts. A photographed body "desires as much as it is desired"—desire circulates without being confined to a single, definitive position. The text thus implicitly reflects art historical traditions (antiquity, Renaissance, classical sculpture) that idealize the male body, while Mapplethorpe stages it in a manner that is both classical and radically contemporary.

The narrator analyzes Freeman's pose as a construction that aims to make the genitals the architectural anchor point of the composition. Here, the penis serves not as a symbol of phallic power, but as a "pedestal" or "pillar" that bears the weight of the entire physical structure. This reversal of perspective—the woman viewing the man as an object—is described in the text as a liberating, albeit amoral, form of appropriation.

When you découvrant the photo, you can see the formal perfection. The architectural equilibrium of the composition is impressive - just like me, which is the same as the visual arts. […] Son accroupissement is outré, voulu pour que le regard converge vers le sexe. The penis is the axis of a triangle isocèle ayant pour parois l'entrecuisse and les mollets. Personne ne prend this pose-là. Il a fallu que quelqu'un dirige le model, il a fallu, pour en arriver là, que le modèle accepte sa soumission absolute à celui qui regarde. The model is contortionné for composer and tableau that has english and dépasse.

When I discovered the photograph, its formal perfection struck me first. The architectural balance of the composition impressed me—even me, someone who keeps his distance from the visual arts. […] His squatting position is exaggerated to draw attention to his genitals. The penis is the axis of an isosceles triangle, the sides of which are formed by his crotch and calves. No one assumes this pose. Someone had to direct the model, and to achieve this result, the model had to accept his absolute submission to the viewer. The model contorted himself to compose an image that both devours and transcends him.

This textual analysis illustrates Majdalani's view of the violence of form. The analysis clarifies that "formal perfection" is understood here as the result of a forced pose that contradicts human anatomy ("No one assumes this pose"). The geometrization of the body into an "isosceles triangle" dissolves the individual Jimmy Freeman; he becomes part of a tableau that "devours" him. The "absolute submission" to the photographer's gaze is the condition for the emergence of beauty. Majdalani demonstrates here that art often presupposes a form of cruelty in order to force matter into an eternal image.

Melancholy of the Trail

The narrator directly connects Mapplethorpe's work with her own upbringing in a conservative religious milieu in Lebanon. The omnipresence of the crucified Christ in her childhood—the man who suffers out of love and offers his body—forms the visual backdrop against which she interprets Mapplethorpe's depictions of pain and ecstasy. Religious prohibition serves as a necessary point of friction in the book: without bigotry, the transgression would lose its luster. Majdalani describes a fascinating parallel between religious ritual and the photographic act. Both seek the "magical" moment that transcends matter. But while religion seeks transcendence, Mapplethorpe remains radically within the immanence of the surface. The "darkroom" thus becomes the antithesis of the church, a place where not God, but desire and form reign. Majdalani takes seriously the connection to Satanism, which Mapplethorpe often dismissed as mere coquetry – not as a belief in a metaphysical being, but as a triumph of matter and the individual against any higher order.

The book's opening establishes photography as an existential challenge: seeing means committing oneself, taking a stand. The conclusion takes up this theme again, but under altered circumstances. After illness, loss, and death, art no longer appears as a triumph over transience, but as a fragile trace. The circle closes as photography no longer appears as a mastery of life, but as its testimony. This movement—from provocation to melancholy, from gesture to trace—lends the book its depth. Beginning and end mirror each other without being identical.

At the outset, there is the gesture of power: the phantasm of control over the other, the child who invents a submissive in their room, and the young Mapplethorpe who wants to conquer Manhattan. Beauty is understood here as a weapon and an instrument of domination. At the end of the narrative, however, overshadowed by illness, loss, and the death of Mapplethorpe and many of his models, the aesthetic shifts. Photography is no longer a triumph over time, but a testament to disappearance. The body, initially presented as an indestructible sculpture, is now revealed in its finiteness and fragility. The narrator directly connects Mapplethorpe's work with her own upbringing in a conservative religious milieu in Lebanon. The omnipresence of the crucified Christ in her childhood—the man who suffers out of love and offers his body—forms the visual backdrop against which she interprets Mapplethorpe's depictions of pain and ecstasy. The religious prohibition serves as a necessary point of friction in the book: without the bigotry, the transgression would lose its luster.

Majdalani describes a fascinating parallel between religious ritual and the photographic act. Both seek the "magical" moment that transcends matter. But while religion seeks transcendence, Mapplethorpe remains radically within the immanence of the surface. The "darkroom" thus becomes the antithesis of the church, a place where not God, but desire and form reign. Majdalani takes seriously the connection to Satanism, which Mapplethorpe often dismissed as mere coquetry—not as a belief in a metaphysical being, but as a triumph of matter and the individual against any higher order.

the novel Le goût des garçons Majdalani's 2021 novel tells the story of a young woman exploring her desires, guilt, and shame amidst religious upbringing and sexual self-empowerment. At the heart of the text lies the narrator's relationship with boys and men, who appear less as individual figures than as projections of her desires. She observes, desires, and uses male bodies to experience herself and to rebel against the imposed order. These relationships are often asymmetrical, characterized by power, distance, and fantasy, and demonstrate how desire can be both self-empowerment and self-harm. The novel portrays female desire as a simultaneously liberating and unsettling force, ignited by male bodies and transgressing social and moral boundaries. In doing so, it lays the autobiographically tinged foundation for... Jimmy Freeman, where this desire is further developed theoretically, aesthetically and critically in art.

The novel repeatedly depicts situations in which the narrator initially observes men from a distance: their gestures, their posture, their physical presence in the room. These glances are not romantic, but analytical and desirous at the same time; the male body is perceived fragmentarily—back, hands, shoulders—less as a person than as a surface. In these moments, Majdalani reverses the classic male gaze: the narrator appropriates him visually without becoming emotionally attached. Furthermore, the desire often unfolds in inner monologues, fantasies, and projections that do not necessarily lead to real relationships. Men are triggers for ideas of power, submission, or transgression, not as equal partners. The desire remains deliberately one-sided: it is the narrator's desire that defines the other, not the other way around.

In specific encounters with men—such as brief affairs or physical advances—a clear asymmetry emerges. The narrator uses closeness and intimacy to learn something about herself: about her body, her feelings of guilt, her capacity for transgression. The men often remain indistinct, interchangeable, almost anonymous; their individuality is less important than the function they fulfill in the narrator's self-experiment. These encounters are frequently followed by a phase of self-examination, in which the narrator scrutinizes her own actions. She questions whether she used or was used, whether power lies in desire or in the moral judgment that follows. It is precisely this reflectiveness that prevents a voyeuristic interpretation: the "use" of male bodies is not celebrated, but rather portrayed as an ambivalent act poised between self-empowerment and self-alienation.

Both of Majdalani's texts revolve around transgression as a poetic and existential principle: the transgression of religious, moral, and aesthetic norms through desire. In both cases, the male body is central—not as an acting subject, but as the object of a female, desiring gaze that reverses power relations. Stylistically, the novel and the essay share a radical intimacy, a conscious proximity to confession, and a language that oscillates between ruthlessness and formal elegance. Le goût des garçons By addressing these questions in a fictionalized, narrative form and making desire physically, immediately, and emotionally tangible, it shifts the focus. Jimmy Freeman The focus is on reflection, theory, and art appreciation. The essay employs distance, using Mapplethorpe's photography as a detour to re-examine the same questions of guilt, the gaze, and power. Poetically, this signifies a shift from the narrative risk of the novel to an essayistic self-examination that appears less exposed but more sharply delineates the ethical and aesthetic implications of desire.

I'm happy, I also want to transform myself and choose. Je peux parler de l'expérience de l'objet. Je peux attester du plaisir que l'on éprouve à se noyer dans le désir d'un other. It is possible to remove the responsibility for life for a child infiniment précieuse et bandante. […] Miraculeusement, the object continues de ressentir. Qu'on l'utilise, qu'on le malmène, qu'on le vénère, son intériorité demeure intacte. Everything is reflected in the camera and the reçoit, after a grand repos, an orgasm before the gratuit, easy, comme une offrande.

I, too, have enjoyed being transformed into an object. I can speak from personal experience. I can attest to the immense pleasure of losing oneself in another's desire. I know it is possible to completely relinquish the responsibility of being a living being, to become an infinitely precious and desirable doll. […] Miraculously, the object continues to feel. Whether used, abused, or worshipped, its inner being remains untouched. Everything resonates within its soul, and from its profound stillness, it receives an almost effortless, gentle orgasm, like a gift.

In this bold passage, the narrator reflects on objectification. She describes the transformation into a "thing" or a "doll" not as a degradation, but as a form of relief from the "responsibility of being alive." Analysis reveals that a paradoxical state of sovereignty is asserted here within complete passivity: The object enjoys its own sensation ("Tout résonne dans son âme"), while the other is reduced to a mere instrument. This "experience of the object" mirrors the situation of Mapplethorpe's models, who, in their "great resting" (grand repos) find an intensity that remains inaccessible to the acting subject. The boundary between living flesh and the fetishized object is portrayed here as fluid and pleasurable.

The book's opening defines art as an intervention in time. The conclusion revisits this perspective, albeit under altered circumstances. Illness, loss, and death have shaken aesthetic certainty. The final pages are imbued with a quiet melancholy. Images remain, people vanish. A phrase like "il ne reste que la trace, et la trace ne console pas" encapsulates this experience.

Classification within the Centre Pompidou series

The recording of Jimmy Freeman The inclusion of this text in the series "un seul art" is consistent. First, the text reflects on art not illustratively, but performatively: it is itself a literary equivalent to Mapplethorpe's photography. Second, it systematically transcends genre boundaries between literature, art criticism, and poetic essay. Third, it addresses central questions of modernity and postmodernity: the body, desire, visibility, and death.

Majdalani's text employs the same techniques as Mapplethorpe: illuminating the scene through language, framing it through perspective, and relentlessly focusing on detail. The book proves that literature is capable of leaving the "darkroom" of art theory and making seeing itself a tangible, existential process.

Majdalani points out that Mapplethorpe's paintings have lost none of their explosive power today, in a time of renewed moral struggles. She reminds us that art must always be a place of danger—a space where one can "get screwed," as she so drastically puts it, referring to religious censorship in Lebanon. Ultimately, Jimmy Freeman a plea for a gaze that is willing to expose itself equally to the “obscene” and the “beautiful”, without calling for a protective morality.

The book concludes with the realization that while photography cannot save us from death, it is the only trace that remains long after our bodies have turned to dust. With this work, Joy Majdalani has created a literary monument that makes the tension between the eternity of the image and the transience of life palpable in every line.

In the end, the trace remains. Photography preserves what is lost, without being able to save it. This insight shapes the book's final tone. The text considers photography not from an external perspective, but from within experience. It understands literature as a space where art continues to have an effect, questioning and transforming itself. In doing so, it aligns with the Centre Pompidou's vision of art as a living discourse.