PsychéThe relationship between soul and body.

The Psyché artistic project explores the relationship between the soul and the body. The mind-body dualism has long raised the issue of the “communication of substances” — namely, how something immaterial, like the soul, can interact with something material, like the body.

This series combines mixed techniques, where the photographic element represents the body (soma), and the manual interventions — through writing or drawing — symbolize the soul (psyché).

The photographic image, representative of the material substance, is rendered in an achromatic scale with a tendency towards black, evoking x-rays. The spiritual substance, on the other hand, is expressed through abstract graphics such as philosophical texts, Cartesian diagrams, chemical or mathematical formulas, and musical notations. To convey this transcendence, golden pigment has been used — a color deeply rooted in cultural tradition and closely linked to Byzantine painting and the divine.

In the images of nude bodies, intentionally dark, the figure is barely perceptible. Light, as a symbol of vital breath (pneuma), is concentrated in the golden traces, so that the images resemble radiographs of the soul.

The main cultural references include chemical formulas of neurotransmitters that affect mood and behavior; Plato’s Phaedo; Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones Disputatae; and the pineal gland, which Descartes identified as the point of contact between soul and body.