A pale green machine stands under a glass display case. It is a model. Actually, there are several of them. They are identical except for one that has an opening in its side. On display are workbenches that rest on three heavy legs on the floor. Horizontal metal guides can be seen at the front. Like the adjustable screws, also installed here, they are highly polished. On the left, there is a manual full of small operating lights and on the right, a crank that guides a pin. It is a professional lathe, which Dr. Gatev, dermatologist and artist, had reproduced as a model. This series of works refers to an artistic project from the communist era when Gatev took over a metalworking company for a day as its director. His order to the employees was to create all workpieces, such as screws, nuts and other tool parts, out of wood. For one day, unusable (but artistically valuable) copies were created.

Dr. Gatev, who is also addressed as an artist by his medical title, calls the series Noli me tangere. The title is an allusion to the New Testament encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, where she tries to touch the Risen Lord, but he rejects her. As a dermatologist, Dr. Gatev is familiar with the sensitivity and vulnerability of skin. At the same time, these devices symbolize for him the interface of the incompatible and yet intimate: the point of contact “between psyche and technology, between the individual and the many, energy and the system, and – perhaps – between God and I.”

Thomas D. Trummer, 2019 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)