Blaise Cepis’ offbeat portraits mix arousal and body horror

Imagine the scene: you go on a date, you manage to convince a perfect specimen to come home with you and then, when you’re rummaging in their pants, there’s a knee where their bits should be. Still turned on? It’s this line between erotic and grotesque that New York-based artist Blaise Cepis tentatively treads, creating deformed, yet kinda hot, bodies using collage and photography.

Born in Philadelphia and now based in New York, Blaise studied at Parsons School of Design before working as a freelance creative at Mother and JWT. Adeptly flitting between fashion shoots and his own much weirder work, Blaise mixes glossy, clean portraiture with the mundane depictions of domesticity. His interest in the manipulation of the body has evolved through several phases, from carefully arranging several obliging models to look like the same body to disjointed digital collages and IRL photograph-human mash-ups. Cute blondes with elongated arachnid legs, frilly-robed ladies having it off with shadows and limbs where limbs really shouldn’t be – it’s the stuff of (sexy) nightmares.