Project: Object of desire. Simone Artale
Feed Overview

A conversation with AI.


 I was born in Rome, beneath that bloated sun that spills itself too easily, too golden, and raised among saints with cracked hands and the smell of dust in libraries. Jesuit fathers spoke in riddles, and I believed them. I studied their theology like one counts rosary beads — not for answers, but for the rhythm of unknowing.
Then Berlin. The cold, the gray. A different kind of chapel. I walked into its veins, its cellars, its wet electric nights. Philosophy by day, skin by night — I tattooed symbols onto strangers as if I could carve meaning into flesh.

I paint. Because I don’t know how else to survive the image.

My studio is in Weißensee now. A dog, a wife, a few ghosts.

Greece calls in the winter, with olives and bones and the blinding white that forgives nothing.

This project — INFLUENCE: Objekt of Desire — is not a work.

It’s the hunger that remains when the miracle doesn’t come.
Agamben and Saint Paul
a theological argument for
the exhibition.

The Sacrament as the Form of Fire

1. Grace

Grace is a free event. It cannot be earned, claimed, or structured. It arrives not because the human is worthy, but because God gives.

Grace is fire: it burns, consoles, illuminates—but cannot be possessed. One does not control grace; one receives it. The only proper response to grace is wonder.

2. The Sacrament

The sacrament—especially the Eucharist—is the visible form of invisible fire. Not a container, not a cage, but a gesture: real, physical, touchable. It is the point where grace becomes flesh again.

The sacrament is not a system. It is not an institution's property. It is an event of presence.

The liturgy is not administration, but hospitality. The priest does not control the grace; he opens space for it.

3. The Church

The Church exists for one purpose only:
That fire might still happen among us.

Not to govern. Not to moralize. Not to dominate. But to carry the sacraments and to give them freely.

Its authority is not juridical, but eucharistic. The Church is not a fortress. It is a broken body, like the bread.

When the Church becomes a machine of power, it betrays the mystery it is meant to serve.

4. Time

We live in what Paul calls "the time that remains"—not the countdown to an end, but the suspension of the ordinary.

Each sacrament opens this time, breaks the timeline of history, and makes the eternal present. The Eucharist is not repetition, but eruption. It is not memory, but living remembrance.

5. A Form-of-Life

I long for a life shaped by the sacrament, but not formalized by law.

To live eucharistically is to live in a posture of offering. It is to receive and let go, to become what one eats: a body given.

The Pauline "as if not" is already embedded in the Eucharist. Whoever receives the Body does not cling to it but becomes it—for others.

6. A Final Invocation

I do not want a powerful Church. I want a poor Church, whose only wealth is the mystery it bears.

I do not want a moralistic faith. I want a real one—one that touches the body and transfigures the world.

The fire cannot be preserved. It can only be received, and passed on.

The sacrament is the living ember of that fire.