This sensual magazine wants to expand the ‘horizons of pleasure’

A few years ago, I came across a stack of horny-looking magazines in an antique store near Leeds – a mini-archive of the Erotic Review. Some of them had illustrative covers – a reimagining of Klimt’s “The Kiss”, except the figures are 69ing, a sketch of Bill Clinton and a group of naked women in Santa hats, a topless woman and her friend reading Erotic Review (meta!) – while others featured risqué or nude photography. Inside, I found features on political sex scandals, essays on food and sex, and short histories about the erotic work or lives of artists from centuries gone by, as well as poems, book recommendations, and erotic classifieds. In the June 2002 issue, there was even an ‘erotic interview’ with Gordon Ramsay.

After buying a few issues – yes, including June 2002 – I was disappointed to learn that the magazine, which launched in 1997, had ceased printing, and, for the last 15 years, has existed only as a little-read online newsletter. That is, until now.

Last week, Erotic Review relaunched as a collectable, limited edition art and literary journal, with the aim of exploring desire as a lens on our common humanity. This time, there are no smutty illustrations (though a personal fave from the archives is one of a King’s Guard holding two giant dildos in a Jubilee centrefold special), but rather carefully curated illustrations, photos, and performance stills from some of today’s most exciting artists. Gone too are the classifieds, but fascinating features remain, including an essay on goon caves by Rebecca Rukeyser, a feature about a shuttered BDSM club in the Netherlands by Sam Ashby, a piece about the omission of sex in contemporary British fiction by Vijay Khurana, and so much more, including fiction, poetry, and visual essays.

Under the direction of editor Lucy Roeber and deputy editor Saskia Vogel, each issue – of which there’ll be three per year – is set to be curated by a different art editor. Fatoş Üstek, who curated the 2023 Frieze sculpture park, is kicking things off, while graphic designer Frith Kerr, the founder of Studio Frith, is behind the magazine’s design. Issue One – with a cover shot by photographer Polly Brown, and featuring performance and visual artists Esben Weile Kjaer, Florence Peake, and Sin Wai Kin – is designed to be an object of desire in itself. 

But, at a time when visual depictions of sex and eroticism can feel more contentious than ever – with sex simultaneously everywhere and nowhere – how will Erotic Review convey desire? What makes an erotic image, anyway?

For Kerr, an erotic image is one that conjures up a feeling of stimulation. “For example, the cover image by Polly Brown,” she says. “Her work is primarily erotic, but not in an obvious way. Desire runs through all her work. She can examine the erotic possibility in a wet hubcap. This goes back to literature – a kind of suburban eroticism, of paper cups, surfaces, the smell of car interiors, the interface of technology and stimulation. Polly captures this human mood in modernity, to transform the sterile into something living.”

Kerr, like Üstek, became involved with Erotic Review after being approached by Roeber, who sought her out to create a new vision for the magazine. Inside, the text bends and curves, creating a sort of kinesic resonance on the page, while the logo gives a sensual nod to the body itself. “The body goes through a physical change during arousal,” says Kerr. “How can this fluidity of desire be rendered [on the page]? A typeface is physical, it’s when an idea (desire) becomes present (carnal). We developed a logotype and typeface that can exchange: layers and edges that rub up against, that open and close, that envelope.”

“All design is about emotion,” she continues. “Desire is emotion. Making something desirable in design is fundamental. Graphic design is an invitation to say, ‘Come here, look, touch, feel, read, and experience’.”

Üstek similarly sought out artists whose work explores the fluidity of desire. “I wanted to bring a wide breadth of artistic expression to engage directly and indirectly with the erotic, the sensual, and the desired,” she explains. “I focused on artists who work with performative practices, expanding the horizons of pleasure and manifestations of desire through appearance, touch, and sensuous, linguistic, and philosophical exchange.”

In Peake’s carnal sketches and performances, Üstek found someone who, as she writes in Issue One, “has the ability to capture what is lingering in the air” via movement, sculpture, and paintings that are “evocative of the whole body’s physicality”. Meanwhile, Kjaer’s bright, stimulating photographs – a series of stills from past performances, mostly of people kissing – invite the reader to become a voyeur; rousing their senses with the most cardinal erotic act. “I’ve been following Florence Peake, Esben Weile Kjaer, and Sin Wai Kin’s practices for a long time,” says Üstek. “I believe in the strength of their works and that they push the boundaries of the conventional – let this be about the sensual and sexual tension or the desirability of the experience. All three artists share a strong visual language that lends itself strongly to being printed on the pages of a magazine.”

The Erotic Review, then, may be antithetical to digital sex – with its immediate gratification, sterile unambiguity, and repressive censorship – instead exploring subtle sexual tension, the nuances of desire, and the extremities and mundanities of eroticism.

“[We’re afraid of eroticism] because we can’t control it,” says Kerr of our increasingly sex negative culture. “As human beings, anything outside our control reminds us of our existential powerlessness. Sex is immensely powerful, it’s used to sell pretty much everything. Of course sex can be and has been misused. Part of investigating it is taking back its agency.”

That’s why now is the perfect time to relaunch the Erotic Review, concludes Kerr. “At a time when technology has transformed every aspect of life, it’s very important for us to understand what it is like to be human”.

Issue One of the relaunched Erotic Review is available to buy online here now.