Flesh

2008

Flesh is an installation composed of a series of drawings that explore the materiality of the body and the shared vulnerability we experience as living beings. Each image originates from the direct scanning of cuts of pork, printed at real scale and manually transferred onto cardboard using carbon paper. The drawing is completed with carbon ink and pencil, preserving a diffuse texture that recalls old medical lithographs. Through this process, the ephemeral becomes record—an attempt to construct a biological or anthropological archive.

The installation brings together nine drawings of anonymous fragments of flesh and a tenth depicting a pig’s heart—an organ close to the human in both anatomy and cultural resonance. Its presence suggests absent beats and amplifies the tension between the vital and the inert, between persistence and decay.

Flesh operates at the threshold between figuration and abstraction. It is no longer flesh as a recognizable object, but rather its trace, its texture, its shadow—vestiges that shift the body into the realm of thought. One might say Flesh turns the biological into the abstract, and the abstract into the biographical: each gaze contributes a different story. Within this ambiguity, evoking the phenomenon of pareidolia, the work proposes a perceptual activation—the viewer becomes a co-author of the image, completing with their imagination what the drawing merely suggests.

Devoid of skin, face, or recognizable form, the flesh becomes a metaphor for the existential and archaic condition of our material body. The slow, meditative process of transfer and drawing demands restraint from the artist’s own body, transforming each mark into an act of attention and resistance.
Flesh reflects on the essential struggle between eating and being eaten, between persistence and disintegration. As an archive of the perishable, it seeks to perpetuate the ephemeral, condensing in each trace the memory of a body that no longer beats but endures as a metaphor for our shared fragility.

Flesh X (Heart), Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh I, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh II, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh III, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh IV, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh V, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh VI, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh VII, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh VIII, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)
Flesh IX, Carbon transfer and charcoal on cardboard. 30 × 40 cm (image: 12 × 15 cm)