Rack't carcasses make ill anatomies – Lucas Marcos Barquilla

Rack't carcasses make ill anatomies is part of tracing a recurring gesture in the anatomical image: that of the body opening up and offering a glimpse of the interior.

Through a series of ceramic reliefs, the exhibition revisits images produced between the 15th and 17th centuries. The figures depicted display their own flesh with a disquieting serenity in their posture and facial expression.

In that stillness and complacency, a particular poetics emerges: that of a body that not only allows itself to be looked at, but seems to collaborate in its own exposure, holding the outermost layers of skin with its hands. This intimate gesture shifts the anatomical image toward a threshold between revelation, vulnerability, and the symbolic construction of the body.

In his works, Lucas Marcos Barquilla delves into an ambiguous territory where the organic nature of the body and the artificiality of the staged image merge. These figures are now defeated organs, exposed to emptiness, in which anatomical study appears as a historical way of ordering visible life.

The supposed objectivity of the scientific image reveals how each muscle, each organ, and each section also responds to a form of power that transforms the body into a legible surface, into available matter, and into territory to be measured, delimited, and put into operation. In this sense, we could say that the anatomical gaze not only observes the body; it also produces it within specific frameworks of thought.

In Lucas Marcos Barquilla's work, the experience of the body is constructed halfway between image and matter, between fragility and permanence. The texture of the ceramic, its relief, its hollows and voids, are traversed by the gaze like an altered skin that opens the representation to affective textures. The promise of transparency is interrupted by reticular accounting papers that limit the depth and visceral persistence of a body that could still collapse before the wound to show that it feels.

Rack't carcasses make ill anatomies, therefore, proposes a reading of the body as a site where forms of knowledge, control, and desire are inscribed. Between flesh and image, between the biological and the technical, the works suggest that what we understand as natural has always been permeated by representational devices that shape our ways of seeing.