Guilherme Taccetti (b. 1983) was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, where he completed a degree at the well-known Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (Superior School of Advertising and Marketing). Since 2009, he has been based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2018, he was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts from the country’s preeminent art education institution, Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.
Taccetti’s practice centres on photography. He constructs elaborate sets, producing images at once tangible and fantastical that draw on elements associated with commercial and fashion photography, film, and tableaux vivant. His works wittingly sample a diverse range of artistic styles, recent and ancient. He has a particular interest in artworks of the High Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque—not only for their dramatic aesthetics, but also for their latent homoeroticism.
Having grown up in a culture intimately bound up with the Catholic Church, Taccetti has developed an interest in exploring the ways in which sexual cultures and practices intersect and play with Christian tropes. His work is not merely a subversion of Catholic traditions, but an investigation of the ways in which such traditions might be understood to actively seed and shape erotic rituals, even when these seem most at odds with Church doctrine.
Taccetti’s photographs are held in several major private collections in New Zealand and Australia.