Flesh of Flesh
2019-2022
![]()
Pinus Sylvestris (Scots Pine), 2019 and Pinus Radiata (Monterey Pine), 2021, installation view: Hypothesis: Everything is Leaf, Robert Capa Contemporary, Budapest, Hungary, 2022
The works concerning the internal, microscopic structure, the “flesh” of trees were inspired by the last work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, which remained unfinished due to his unexpected death. Here Merleau-Ponty goes beyond his earlier concept, which rejected the transcendental ego and placed the body in the focus of experience, and introduces the radical notion of “Flesh” (“la chair”). This collective flesh is simultaneously our own flesh and the flesh of the world (chair du monde). "Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?" (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p.138)
From here on, the perception at the centre of Merleau-Ponty’s postulation essentially involves the community between our body and the world – all perception is the direct result of the ancient connection with Being – as well as their fusing in each other. We can perceive matters because we are also organic parts of the world: flesh of flesh. The world perceives itself through us. “The visible can thus fill me and occupy me because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself.” (MP, 1968, p.114.)
Merleau-Ponty first returns transcendence to the body, then gives back the body to the world’s Flesh-texture. The deep ecological interpretation of the concept of Flesh raises the entwined nature of all forms of living, the mutual dependence, the vulnerability of the ecological system as a whole, and the interwoven character and awareness of all human, animal and vegetal modes of living. As an effect of Flesh replacing the concept of “lived-body”, nature is no longer an irresponsive, numb set or decoration separated from the human being and observed from afar. “… that the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things… That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being.” (MP, 1968, p.194)
![]()
Pinus Sylvestris (Scots Pine), 2019, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 127 x 102 cm / 50 x 40 inches
Pinus Sylvestris (Scots Pine), 2019, detail
Abies Alba (European Silver Fir), 2019, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 127 x 102 cm / 50 x 40 inches
![]()
Abies Alba (European Silver Fir), 2019, detail
Pinus Radiata (Monterey Pine), 2021, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 127 x 102 cm / 50 x 40 inches
Pinus Radiata (Monterey Pine), 2021, detail
Cariniana pyriformis (Colombian Mahogany), 2018, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 127 x 102 cm / 50 x 40 inches
