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NOLI ME TANGERE

By Alessia Carlino 

"The body is many things together: theme, figure of the intersection between exterior and plural, stylistic intensity in writing, even autobiographical and existential".

The words of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy trace the signs of Jeff Schneider's painting: the body, in the faces portrayed by the artist, is not only a symbolic structure, but also a physical object that collects the aesthetic perceptions of a composition.

In Schneider's works femininity is sedimented matter, into his traces of color, in his abstract lines, the body becomes a reverberation, a reflection of the artist's identity.

The physiognomies interfere with the space generating an invisible place, it is the prose of an environmental structure where a complex mutation carried out by the artist through his technical abundance, and scarred by the absorption of the real insinuates: "nothing more proper, nothing more foreign to our old world. Own body, foreign body, foreign body”, emphasizes Nancy.

Noli Me Tangere in Latin literally means "you can't touch me", this impossibility, this interdiction, is a lack, a body removed from the touch. In Schneider's work, the concept analyzed in the Christian iconography translates into the view of an inviolable subject.

The physiognomic presence of the body is nothing but absence, the sliding towards something intangible.

This does not mean that the artist's representations tell of an immaterial and spectral body, its presence is the proof of an indefinable reality, but at the same time, the body retracts into contact, since not touching it, we can assist to its eternity.

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Born and raised in Rome, Alessia Carlino, is an art historian, curator and contributing writer to InsideArt and L´Aperitivo Illustrato. She is also an artistic director of SpazioMR a gallery located in Via del Babuino in Rome, where she has curated several exhibitions.

Her latest show with Micaela Lattanzio opens this October at the Emme Otto gallery in Rome.