Rico the Zombie
At the age of 15, Rick Genest went 'to hell and back'. Today, the descent of the world's most avant-garde male model into the fire and his subsequent phoenix-like rise is writ large over his face, head, neck and nearly every other square inch of skin. It is impossible to imagine what Genest, now 26, and renamed Rico the Zombie, must have felt when doctors told him he had a brain tumour that could kill him or leave him disfigured for life. But, it seems, the diagnosis gave birth to a fascination, you might say an obsession, with the morbid and macabre.
Having cheated both death and any visible physical damage a decade ago, this handsome young man transformed his entire body - including his face - into a canvas for his ghoulish interests by covering himself in tattoos. Themed on a rotting corpse, they include blackened eye sockets, depictions of withered flesh on bones and cockroaches scuttling an inky path up his neck into the spider web in his ear. 'Everyone has a different idea of what is beautiful,' Genest says. 'It's not as if it's a real corpse. It's art. I'm a work in progress. I like being a freak. That's my ambition.'
Today, the descent of the world's most avant-garde male model into the fire and his subsequent phoenix-like rise is writ large over his face, head, neck and nearly every other square inch of skin. It is impossible to imagine what Genest, now 26,
