Milan creates collages and drawings that present the body -- especially the Black male body -- as a site of both beauty and conflict. His work incorporates mass media images, his own photographs, and references to iconic artworks. This hybrid collage-drawing relates to a series in which he reexamined the figures in Robert Mapplethorpe's The Black Book of 1986. The gestalt of the figure is undermined by cuts and multiple views, as in a cubist collage. The realism of Milan's photographic sources is further complicated by the lack of resolution in the drawn and colored passages, in which his admiration for Francis Bacon is apparent. He once told an interviewer, "I like the idea of appropriating a beautiful image ... then deconstructing [it] ..., and then piecing the image back together. Sometimes when you're piecing it back together, the figure may appear slightly grotesque but there's still a level of beauty and attraction."
Initialed and dated lower right: "WM 21".