Pino Boresta's Corporeal Residues: A Retrospective of Bodily Art

Pino Boresta, an Italian artist born in Rome and living in Segni, has spent decades creating art from his own bodily residues—semen, hair, nails, and navel lint—as a form of authentic self-portraiture. His project, 'Residui Corporei,' began in 1987 when he first mixed semen with oil paints, and by 1988 he was affixing hair and dried semen to the backs of his 'Tovaglioli' paintings as a biological signature. From 1990 he collected hair, nails, and other residues, and in 1994 started making works solely with dried semen on cotton cloth, later adding handwritten dates and progressive masturbation numbers. In 2012, a TURP surgery for urethral stenosis caused retrograde ejaculation, permanently ending his ability to produce semen-based works. Boresta first exhibited the project in 1998 at Galleria Il Graffio in Bologna, curated by Anteo Radovan, with a minimalist installation of wooden boxes containing residues and a video of him masturbating. In 2021, he reprised the work at Galleria Micro Arti Visive in Rome in a show titled 'Il corpo di Boresta,' but it was cut short by the pandemic. The article also traces a history of bodily art from Piero Manzoni's 'Merda d'artista' (1961) to Franko B's 'I miss you' (1999), contextualizing Boresta's practice within a lineage of artists using biological materials.