Caressing Walls

Caressing Walls investigates what happens at the precise point where one body meets another. Rather than imagining intimacy as a dissolution of boundaries, the project considers the limit itself as a space of experience: the place where desire, vulnerability, resistance and alterity become tangible.

While Kosmatopoulos’s work often explores porous bodies, fluid identities and unstable boundaries, here the material presence of a limit becomes central. For the first time, the wall enters the work not simply as an obstacle, but as a physical extension of the boundary between self and Other.

At the centre of this inquiry are the skin and the hand: the skin that is touched, and the hand that touches while also being touched. This phenomenological reversibility, explored by Merleau-Ponty, turns contact into an exchange between two sensitive bodies without erasing the boundary between them. The Other appears simultaneously as a conscious presence and as flesh: living matter that can be touched, desired, wounded or shaped.

In Inhabit Your Body, enlarged photographs of wounds left by the artist on her husband’s skin during intimacy enter sculptural assemblages with materials recovered from building demolition sites. The skin becomes a wall: a fragile boundary that protects and separates, but also bears the marks of the desire to overcome that separation. Flesh and architecture meet as two forms of enclosure, both vulnerable to pressure, rupture and contact.

This tension between reaching the Other and remaining outside continues through language. Drawing from the Song of Songs, the desired body is approached through fruit, taste and metaphor. Fruit takes the place of flesh while retaining its sensual presence; words approach sensations they cannot physically contain. The body moves into another material without entirely disappearing from it.

The distance implicit in metaphor becomes an explicit prohibition in works developed around Noli me tangere. The body of Christ is visible to Mary Magdalene yet withdrawn from her touch. Kosmatopoulos repositions their hands until they finally meet and transforms Cogito ergo sum into Tangor ergo sum: “I am touched, therefore I exist.” If Descartes locates the self within thought, here its limits emerge through contact with what lies beyond it.

Two bodies meet through the hand, yet the flesh being touched remains simultaneously a person and a material surface. A caress can become pressure, examination or modelling, as though the living body were clay. The desire to reach the Other thus approaches another threshold: the point at which contact risks becoming possession, and recognition gives way to the impulse to shape the Other according to one’s own desire.

Across these works, skin, wall, fruit, image and flesh repeatedly occupy the uncertain boundary between presence and matter. Caressing Walls asks where the self ends and the Other begins, and how identity becomes perceptible precisely through what resists it.

The boundary does not merely separate self from Other.

It is where both become perceptible.