Belmacz presents Bruiseless, an exhibition bringing together the work of Ja Jess and Andrea Marcellier. The title refers to a state of collision that leaves no superficial marks on the skin, while nevertheless suggesting the presence of impact. Across the exhibition, both artists explore forms of touch that reach beneath the visible surface, considering what is taken and what is given through the body, desire and intimacy. Ja Jess approaches these questions through still lifes centred on egg donation, while Marcellier presents masturbatory sculptures in which bodily gestures become sites of pleasure, vulnerability and transformation.

For Andrea Marcellier, gesture becomes a space in which intimacy is negotiated through what can and cannot be touched. Her practice brings together flowers, weapons, flesh and ornamental forms, transforming tools of oppression through acts of decoration until they become objects of attraction. Beauty functions as a lure, drawing attention towards collective silences and desires and revealing the point at which tenderness and control meet. Ja Jess, meanwhile, understands their performativity through a series of social drag characters that disrupt the boundaries between physical presence, anatomy and inherited histories. Through figures such as a stripper, mortician, archaeological worker and egg-cell donor, their work examines the ways in which biopolitical norms move through bodies, while treating anatomy as a collective archive transmitted through touch.

Together, the practices of Ja Jess and Andrea Marcellier create a space in which the intimate and the social become inseparable. Their works consider the body not as a fixed or private entity, but as a site where fantasies, genetic histories, social structures and forms of desire intersect. The exhibition’s title evokes an encounter whose effects may remain invisible, suggesting that touch can simultaneously contain the possibility of new life and the fleeting pleasure of the body, as well as traces of violence and transformation. Bruiseless therefore brings together two practices concerned with what happens beneath the surface: the unseen consequences of contact, the desires that shape bodies, and the forms of intimacy through which personal and collective histories are carried forward.