The Haptic Eye - (2021)

From the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, in painted iconography, the risen Christ says to those around him: ‘Noli me tangere’, do not touch me. Today we know that the intended meaning is ‘do not hold on to me’, let me go where I must. And trying to hold on has been the aim of reproducing the human body throughout the history of art, from its very origins: trying to hold on to loved ones whose presence in our lives is destined to end. Even more so with photography, capable of raising the dead and killing the living… Benjamin spoke of a haptic eye, an eye that works as if it were touching images, of images that offer themselves to sight in terms of tactility. Barthes identifies the noeme of photography in the presence of the real before the camera. He tells us that images are the emanation of a referent; they are imprints. From a real body, which was there, rays set out that reach me, who am here. In these photos I imagined a reverse path: an eye capable not only of retracing the curves of these naked bodies, but of touching, and altering, those forms, objects of desire. The imprints of the eye… The project will also include male bodies.