Sala Parés inaugurates 'Joan Boy. Noli Me Tangere'

Room 2 of Sala Parés opens on April 4 at 7 p.m. Joan Boy. Noli Me Tangere, exhibition that can be visited until May 18.

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, don't me retinguis, which deprives them of immediacy.

Thus, the figures are deprived of the sense of touch in favor of vision which, in the words of the philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, protects against all sexual or physical violence, because the untouchable is present in all the parts where the sacred exists. Its condition is withdrawal, distance: "the distinction and the immeasurable" of the beauty offered only to the eye, deprived of apprehension.

The physical contact between the figures generates a bodily tension that is perceived as problematic and invasive, as if trying to preserve the aura of the transfigured bodies. This aura is a protection, a sacred sphere that creates a particular warp of space and time, separated from our world, in order to procure the unrepeatable appearance of a distance, however close it may be, which inevitably refers to Walter Benjamin's notion of aura.

The figures are presented in scenes where the landscape, the curtains or the rooms give a feeling of distance from the world and, at the same time, of an unawakened intimacy that ensures the prohibition of touch in favor of sight. It is looked at, because they allow themselves to be looked at, but not touched, as if not touching were the condition by which the viewer could be touched, touché.