Body

Body

CPR GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

BY LUCAS BOYLE

Lucas Boyle is a Cleveland-based artist
mapping the body’s surface as terrain

Out of a fear of intimacy—emotional and otherwise—emerged a yearning driven not solely by lust, but by a desire for comfort and serenity. The pull toward what lay beyond the act itself, toward something tangible rather than virtual, drew me ever closer to the intimate topography of the body. Observing the undulations of skin and the varied textures of hair became a cathartic fascination, offering the safety of proximity without true vulnerability—a space of faux intimacy.

Virtual sex, through pornography and the exchange of self-images, strips away the context of true proximity. It omits the quiet moments of observation: the way one studies the crease of an eyelid, or the subtle terrain between navel and chest—the transitional compositions of the body that exist only within intimate encounters. It lacks those simple before, during, and after moments, where two people linger in each other’s presence.

Though long since artificial, I continue to dwell in this liminal space between the intimate and the erotic. By focusing on the intersections of skin and fabric, and by framing vantage points that abstract location and context, I invite a voyeuristic fantasy—prompting viewers to imagine themselves alongside the body they behold.