Henri Matisse - Fleurs d'Amaryllis, 1941, pen and ink on paper, 20.2 x 26.4 cm

The love of god’s creatures is ever the sign and the path of a love that is infinitely more true, more lacerating, more pure than divine love.

— On Nietzsche, Georges Bataille trans. Stuart Kendall

Woman Smoking a Cigarette by Man Ray, 1920

Georges Bataille, Histoire de L'oeil

György Kepes - Juliet’s Shadow Caged, 1939

Miremengjes

Mary Delany, Passiflora Laurifloria. 1700s

Anyone who dismisses love cannot understand reality. This is true of all realities—physical reality and the reality of thought, but also especially the reality of the biosphere, the reality of bodies. No biological denoscription is complete unless it is laid out as a biology of love. And conversely, we do not understand love if we fail to see that it is linked to the living world, to the experience of inhabiting a living body that trembles in joy and winces in pain. Love is a practice of enlivenment. The erotic is the genuine principle of life that permeates the world of bodies and life-forms.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley