A still-warm blade has just been laid on the table. Something has been severed. A fragile, peaceful membrane split open in a swift incision. A door of flesh thrown open to the four winds. A gaping wound.

First, the red leaps out at you: a bright, deep carmine spilling forth, eager to escape, to flow elsewhere, to release into the air its metallic scent—an odor of violation, of the blade itself that scattered it. The wound still pulses; it breathes. Shapes emerge within it—a chaotic soup of disparate elements, mingling, colliding, merging. And so, instinctively, we do what we’ve always done before a bag of seeds or a sandy shore: we slowly plunge our hand into this unruly magma, stirring, searching, feeling. From it, we pull a gelatinous, translucent sphere; a weeping flower; an ancient clay pot; a long, aqueous coil like a snake's freshly shed skin still full of its sluggish occupant; a few pitiable remnants that might be objects or fragments of objects; and then a form we know intimately—our own—whose presence we sense contains life and must, too, be opened, because, in the end, we need to understand.

The blade and the wound are cold now, but the findings remain, freshly unearthed and offered up to view. These are the works of the artists of 《HARUSPEX》, who have gathered for this exhibition the fruits of their dissections. Haruspex—named for the Etruscan diviners who read the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals. The term's etymology traces back to harviga: “inspector of entrails.” The artists here have likewise incised forbidden surfaces, seeking to unravel the chaotic secrets of the motifs they conceal. Each of them explores, as Henri Michaux put it, this “strange inside-outside,” driven by the intuition that one form can conceal others. To be certain, they know they must dare to cut, dig, extract, pierce, or tear—and risk no longer fully understanding what they see. To shift perspective. To let the gaze wander, the footing falter, the stomach churn. Every gaping wound invites vertigo.

Where does this need to open, dissect, and dissolve boundaries come from? To see ourselves in cross-section, hollowed out, from the inside and in parts? Is it to reveal a more intimate truth, intuitively felt to still burn within the interior it saturates? To expose our still-raw nerves to the world? Is it to test the limit state, that diffuse boundary separating us from what we are not? Or is it, driven by a scopophilic urge, to seek the tipping point between desire and disgust, transgression and delight, desert and disorder? To revive the imagination, to disturb the surface, to maintain tension and attention? To liberate, as Deleuze said, the life imprisoned by man? Or is it an instinctive compulsion, an inevitable transgression—to open the door we know is forbidden, the door of Bluebeard’s tale?

Dissecting the human body was long a taboo, even in antiquity. In his History of Animals, Aristotle wrote: “It is not without great repugnance that one can see what constitutes the human species.” This disgust partly explains why the ancient Greeks forbade cadaver dissection, their aversion heightened by respect for the dead and a distaste for blood, then considered a pollutant. Exceptions include a highly active Alexandrian dissection school in the 3rd century BCE, made famous by figures like Herophilos, who reportedly performed over 600 live dissections on prisoners, sometimes in public sessions. Yet dissection was rare in the Middle Ages, despite not being formally banned by the Church. David Le Breton, an anthropologist specializing in representations of the body, notes that in the Middle Ages, the body was not seen as a category of the self—as modernity would later conceive it—but as part of the world’s symbolic system. The body was a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm; violating its integrity was akin to scarring the universe.

The Black Death, by necessity, popularized public autopsies. Guy de Chauliac, one of the Middle Ages' greatest physicians, studied plague victims, distinguishing bubonic plague from its pulmonary form. Exposed to the dead, he contracted the disease but survived, even performing incisions on his own buboes.

In 1532, an 18-year-old Andreas Vesalius began secretly dissecting cadaver fragments bought from grave diggers. Already, he suspected the ancient texts he studied at university were mistaken. After earning his degree, he became a professor of anatomy in Padua, where he obtained permission to dissect executed criminals’ bodies. His life's work culminated in the monumental De humani corporis fabrica, a 700-page anatomical treatise filled with detailed illustrations attributed to Jan van Calcar. Vesalius died at 49, his burial site lost, as if to ensure no one would dissect him in turn.

In 1632, Nicolaes Tulp sought to surpass Vesalius. To cement his reputation, he commissioned a portrait of himself teaching anatomy. The painting’s fame would eclipse his own: at 26, Rembrandt captured a tableau of greenish flesh, taut nerves, and heavy air, establishing himself among painters for whom the brush was a blade.

This lineage of artists—Chardin, Ribera, Courbet, Goya, and Soutine—has long grappled with the visceral. For Soutine, painting flayed animals released a primal childhood cry. Every wound demands a lament. This lament arises from the unbearable collision of form and formlessness, beauty and horror, life and death within a single image.

This dissonance echoes in Renaissance anatomical Venuses, female mannequins with ecstatic faces and open bellies for medical study. In Opening Venus, Georges Didi-Huberman describes the unsettling union of Thanatos and Eros: “This masked, disturbing hinge where being touched—moved—becomes being wounded, being opened.” Opening a body reveals the brutal collision of worlds skin normally separates: raw and cooked, light and dark, public and intimate.

The works here brim with this jagged sensuality, attracting as they repel. Anna Castro de Barbosa’s blades flirt with curves; metal and glass press against flesh in a precarious intimacy that never resolves. The wandering glass bead replaces the wide-eyed gaze brushed by Buñuel’s razor in Un Chien Andalou: it is our eye, and the one that cannot look away.

Lucile Boiron’s photographs scar the world’s origin with silent wounds, a serene clinicality tinged with stupor. Camille Azéma’s ceramics remain feverish and strangely appetizing, their wounds hidden in folds, tempting hands with the terrible intuition that her sculptures might flinch under touch. Hanna Jo’s paintings, too, quiver with warmth, inviting us into cavernous depths where organs glide and remind us of their restless presence.

For Ondochimeg Davadoorj and Thomas Perroteau, animation hides gestation. Every form holds others within, poised to emerge and transform. Dissection confronts this plurality, the eternal metamorphosis that sustains life.

For the artists of 《HARUSPEX》, the boundary is clear: it lies where they have cut. All that remains is to tickle the still-sensitive surface before it scars over and to embrace the liberty of existing on the edges of comprehension, where surprise bursts forth: desire simmers in raw flesh, passion pulses through blue veins, and faith erupts from torn hearts. In the gash, the living overflows, and life begins anew.

References

• 《HARUSPEX》)