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.
(A sketch in trembling flesh)
To draw the Eucharist. Not because I can. But because I must. Because I desire it. And because desire, in the end, is the only thing real.
Today is Holy Thursday. The night of the Supper. The night of the Body given. The night where desire meets flesh, where love kneels and washes feet.
Without the body, there is no Eucharist. Without the body, there is no desire.
Desire begins in the flesh. Not in the abstract, but in skin, in hunger, in touch. And Christ did not speak of love in the abstract. He broke Himself. He said: Take, eat. And He meant: Desire Me. Desire Me in your body. Let Me become yours.
To draw the Eucharist. A simple enough task for the hand. But I have found that it is not the hand that trembles—it is the heart.
And the body. My body trembles every time I receive it. Not out of fear, but because it knows: it is not eating bread. It is touching fire.
This trembling is the only honest line I can draw.
I set out to paint a body. Not a memory of a body, nor an idea of one, but a real body: Resurrected. Tattooed. Standing. Not on a hill in Jerusalem, not in a tomb, but in the new Heavens.
This is no illustration. This is a wound. This is my IObject of Desire. Object petit A.
What is the Eucharist? A thing so ordinary, so edible— and yet, it is everything: the fullness of the reality.
A philosopher once asked: can אֲדֹנָי make Himself so small? The answer, apparently, is yes. Yes, and He does so daily, in bread broken and wine poured, in the stillest moments between bells, on the tongue, in the heart, in me.
My heart stirs. But it is my body that knows. The moment it touches my tongue, something shifts. Something more present than presence. A silence so full it makes my skin ache.
But how to paint that?
I turned to Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, and he burned my eyes with the light of glory. He whispered that the Cross is not over, that Calvary is not a hill in history but an altar now. He told me that when the priest lifts the host, he lifts the Crucified One again— not as symbol, but as presence, as reality made visible to faith.
So I painted. Not history. Not fiction. But a scene that bleeds into liturgy, where the blood runs not down, but inward. Into the chalice. Into the Church. Into me.
And then came Eckhart, whose words have no edges and whose אֲדֹנָי has no name. He dared to say: אֲדֹנָי is born in the soul as truly as He was born in Bethlehem. He dared to ask: What if the Eucharist is not something you receive, but something you become?
So I erased. I removed detail. I made space for silence, for light, for a body that is there and not-there, a presence too full to be captured, but too urgent to ignore.
And through this process, Agamben came to mind. Not because he believes in transubstantiation, but because he understands the stakes of presence. He knows the fragility of forms, and the danger of capturing life with law.
"To think the Eucharist is to think a form-of-life, VITA NUDA" I imagine him saying, a life that cannot be separated from its gesture, from its liturgical act.
Agamben teaches me that the body is the battlefield. That to represent it—as painter, priest, or philosopher—is never neutral. That every attempt to capture presence risks turning it into exception, into spectacle.
And yet, the Eucharist insists: This is my body. Not yours. Mine. Given.
And I receive it. Trembling. Not because I doubt, but because I believe. I believe something infinite has made itself edible, and I carry it in my chest, like a hidden flame.
This exhibition is not about answers. It is about hunger and desire. It is about standing before a mystery with nothing but paint and trembling.
How do you draw the Eucharist?
I don’t know. But I believe it is possible. Not because I have succeeded, but because He said: This is my body. And אֲדֹנָי meant it.