Carne
- Publisher
- Self-published
- Year
- 2016
"Where are we to put the limit of the body and of the world, given that the world is flesh?" — Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. The work was prompted by the French phenomenologist’s concept of flesh. Merleau-Ponty set out to understand the riddles proper to human existence through a philosophy grounded in bodily perception and in our rootedness in the world, able to explore the subjective and fold it into a wider notion of reason and reality. Looking for an ontology that could tie experience, creation, origin and being into a single fabric, he defines the flesh of the world as a sensory channel between our body and the things around us: if they and we communicate, it is not because they act on our sense organs and our nervous system, nor because our understanding turns them into ideas and concepts, but because they and we belong to the same flesh — which is neither matter nor spirit, but halfway between the space-time individual and consciousness, a crossing of the visible with the invisible. The artist set out to compose an atmosphere able to suggest that sensitive interweaving of person and world through photographic language, used as a poetic way of bringing opposites close: matter and spirit, the sensible and the intelligible, the visible and the invisible, looking inward and looking out. Crossing pictures from his own affective world with landscapes and natural elements, he strains at the narrative and symbolic links the book allows as a support — sequence, format, rhythm, emotional contour, structure and graphic choices — gathering meanings in images as one gathers words in a poem.