Paul Elliman’s striking close crops from fashion, porn and sports magazines

In 2013 London-based artist Paul Elliman compiled hundreds of images of people taken from the pages of fashion, porn and sports magazines, each carefully cropped to create vague and abstract compositions, into a 600-page book project, Untitled (September Magazine). From bent knees to splayed hands, the book is a compendium of body language and gestures which Paul has now converted into a video work currently playing on an endless loop at the Carl Freedman Gallery in Shoreditch.

Sitting in a dark room viewers are privy to an entrancing and never-ending stream of closely cropped body parts – clothed and naked – and details of vintage clothes, whether glittery tights, silver puffer jackets, candy-cane stripes or gold lamé. “I was looking to salvage something human from the realm of media images,” Elliman has said, “establishing moments of intimacy in the detail of an elbow or a back or a shoulder, finding something sensual in otherwise cold or preposterous depictions of sex.”

Paul Elliman: Untitled (September Magazine) is on at the Carl Freedman Gallery until 3 October.