“Antinous” depicts one of the only identifiable figures in Doganoglu’s painting: this is Emperor Hadrian’s favorite lover, deified post-mortem and immortalized through countless sculptures, cities and temples in his name, turned into a symbol of homosexual love, reaching us across the centuries. Through Doganoglu’s depiction of his petrified face, Antinous becomes an ode to the erotic pendulum swinging between the sweetness of desire and the bitterness of absence. It also represents the triangulation of mimetic desire between a desiring subject, a desired object and the symbol, or model, that teaches us what and how to desire. In this sense, the head of Antinous, as an erotic symbol, also serves as a metaphor for painting, and especially for Doganoglu’s painting as it relates to desire. The textured materiality, the sensual roughness of his ambiguous surfaces on the verge of dissolution call for an empathetic and tactile relationship that invites the viewer to identify, self-recognize and project their own desires.