NOLI ME TANGERE

Every image is a decoy in the face of the unknown.
If I observe with such zeal all the space that surrounds me,
it is because I search with an endless fever for something that is missing. 

Pascal Quignard, The Sexual Night

Joan Boy is a painter of corporeal souls, but not without reality and carnality. The artist presents us with a slightly androgynous female figure, exposed, naked and fragile, with a halo of distance that protects her under the imperative of evangelical origin, noli me tangere, do not hold me back, which deprives her of immediacy.

The figures are thus subtracted from the sense of touch in favour of vision which, in the words of the philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, protects from all sexual or physical violence, because the untouchable is present everywhere where the sacred exists. Its condition is withdrawal, distance: “the distinction and immeasurability” of beauty offered only to sight, deprived of apprehension.

The physical contact between the figures generates a bodily tension that is perceived as problematic and invasive, as if an attempt is being made to preserve the aura of the transfigured bodies. This aura is a protection, a sacral sphere that creates a particular warp of space and time, removed from our world, to procure the unrepeatable appearance of a remoteness, however close it may be, which inevitably brings us back to Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura.

The figures are presented in scenes in which the landscape, the curtains or the rooms give a sensation of detachment from the world and at the same time of unveiled intimacy, ensuring the prohibition of touch in favour of sight. They are looked at, because they allow themselves to be looked at, but not touched, as if not touching were the condition for the spectator to be touched, touché.

Maria Gelpí Rd