In Dirty Talk, Patrick Alan Banfield builds a heated, red saturated interior in which masculinity appears as something staged, watched, decorated and disguised. The room feels intimate, artificial and slightly wrong. It is too pink, too soft, too sexual, too childish, too controlled.

On the monitors, a raw version of a chapter from Banfield’s film SOYBOY is shown. On a seventies tube monitor, the video Lustkammer appears, showing a young bodybuilder and an older dancer posing naked on a rotating turntable. The same turntable is also present in the room, now carrying an old PowerMac G4 Cube that plays another fragment of SOYBOY. The computer becomes a body, a sculpture, a relic and a fetish object at the same time.

Banfield’s own ironic self portrait, a shirtless mirror selfie of the artist, is placed among heart shaped cushions, a children’s airplane lamp, red LED tubes and old screens. The installation moves between vanity, vulnerability, boyish fantasy and the visual language of male performance. The pink camouflage fabrics on the walls look like artificial silk. They take a military pattern and push it into candy colors, into something supposedly feminine, decorative and seductive. Camouflage no longer hides the body in war. It hides the violence inside softness.

Dirty Talk continues Banfield’s earlier installation Man Cave, but shifts its atmosphere. The room is less like a male refuge and more like a trap made of desire, design, memory and embarrassment. Masculinity is not explained here. It is shown as a room one can enter, look at, enjoy, mistrust and maybe not leave unchanged.