TOUCH ME NOT
SASCHA VENTURI
Curated by Federica Viola
FRANKFURT – NOV 2025
during the studio visit organised at Atelier Frankfurt it was exhibited the project Touch Me Not wich is born from the hybridization between human sensitivity and artificial intelligence, and appears as a visual field in which the tension between attraction and repulsion takes on extraordinary intensity. The images, which at first seem familiar and reassuring – ripe fruit, thick milk, soft sweets – soon reveal themselves to be ambiguous, evoking flesh, organic residue, bodies escaping clear definition.
In this ambivalence, the viewer is compelled to question their own perceptual and emotional limits, suspended between aesthetics and unease, between what they believe to be reassuring and what they are no longer accustomed to seeing. The artist forces us to recognize the limits of our gaze, emphasizing how being a mere spectator is no longer enough, provoking a radical reflection on body, identity, and the artificial.
Touch Me Not thus becomes a visual ritual where beauty appears and dissolves, where what is familiar becomes estranged, and where, between attraction and repulsion, a new space of perception opens.
Connecting Thread of the Three Projects
In all four projects presented in the exhibition, a space of suspension is created, an intermediate, fragile, and fertile environment in which ordinary perception is interrupted. Faced with a void charged with potential, the individual is invited to question their relationship with reality, with the body, with memory, with others and with the space they inhabit.
In Solo: Proiezione, Venturi suspends the time of the image.
The work does not show what happens, but what occurs before and after the action, the invisible interval in which identity examines itself. The image is not documentation, but a mental space where personal memory and shared perception come into tension.
In Touch Me Not, the suspension is emotional and sensorial.
The image attracts and repels at the same time. It draws us closer to what we believe is familiar, only to unanchor it, rendering it simultaneously corporeal and artificial.
Confronted with these visual hybrids, the viewer is compelled to pause, to recognize the limits of perception, and to rethink the notion of “body”.
It is a void between desire and rejection, between recognition and estrangement.
In SAVE Letter Project, the suspension becomes relational.
Meaning is not given but awaited. The work is activated the moment the recipient – faced with a gesture that is unexpected and not immediately interpretable – pauses and decides how to respond.
It is a space of potential relation that demands attention, presence, and slowness.
Finally, with Pinboard Art, suspension turns spatial. The work is displaced into marginal, overlooked corners of everyday life, questioning what we consider visible or worthy of attention.
In front of Venturi’s works, the viewer cannot simply look, they must inhabit them.
The works initiate a ritual of attention, inviting us to slow down and linger at the threshold between what is known and what has not yet taken form.
His artistic research may be described as a poetics of the interval: between image and memory in Solo: Proiezione, between touch and emotional distance in Touch Me Not, between communication and silence in SAVE Letter Project, between centre and margin in Pinboard Art.
In all four cases, the artwork does not depict reality, but opens the hidden space in which what we can no longer see, feel, or say may re-emerge.
Venturi works in the suspended instant, creating experiences that do not offer answers but activate questions, reopening the possibility to see, to feel, and to communicate anew.
FEDERICA VIOLA
