DIFUSIE Magazine Issue 022 — “The Hateful Twenty”

DIFUSIE Magazine assembles its most formidable legion for Issue 022: “The Hateful Twenty: A Genesis of Rude, Unfiltered Flesh.” This is not a photoshoot; it is a gathering of storms. Featuring twenty of the most iconic and unapologetic male forms in contemporary art—Buck Wilder, Costa Tanner, Vladimir Pasternak, Steve Stiffy, Tom Grant, Hector Valverde, Leon Sesti, Al Denton, Adil Frost, Mike Ferris, Marat Casapin, Malik Vogov, Noar Drake, Duke Savage, Jett Black, Mark Rock, Pulkit Puket, Itan Primac, Dan Holov, and Trip Hasard—this volume is a deafening manifesto of raw, untamed masculinity.

The concept is a deliberate overload. Shot across the three most iconic stages of desire—the stark geometry of Mykonos, the primal cliffs of Amalfi, and the dissolving horizons of the Maldives—the issue presents a relentless visual assault. There is no narrative of vulnerability or suggestion. Styled by Dusan Nikola Ripley in nothing but their own formidable skin, the models are captured in a state of defiant, hungry physicality. The lens of Yuri Sokolov and Elena van Gallen operates with brutal, unflinching clarity, fixating on the sheer, monumental presence of the male form, presented without context, apology, or artistic filter. This is the body as a blunt object of truth.

The sets by Andy Draper become mere backdrops against which this concentrated energy erupts. Indira Samrat’s lighting is pitiless, carving each form out of the environment with surgical precision. The effects by Mira Trocky and Leonardo van de Schtender are minimal, focusing only on amplifying the visceral reality of sweat, heat, and raw presence. The “hateful” in the title is not malice, but a relentless, uncompromising rejection of prettiness, of subtlety, of anything less than the full, confrontational fact of their being.

In a series of terse, explosive interviews conducted by Elena Volk, the twenty articulate a singular, collective ethos: an unapologetic ownership of space, desire, and form. They speak of the power in being “napaljeni i bezobrazni”—of channeling raw, unrefined hunger into a silent, physical challenge to the viewer.

DIFUSIE 022: The Hateful Twenty. This is not a collection of portraits. It is an occupation. We didn’t ask for your admiration. We demand your acknowledgment. Look upon the work and know that this is what happens when beauty stops being polite and starts telling the fucking truth.