In the evolution of organs, skin came first. Life emerged and folded back on itself creating a sensory barrier between itself and the world, separating the inside from the outside. The skin is a threshold that mediates between subject and object, constituting the division between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. What interacts with the threshold of the skin leaves a trace on the senses, and among these traces the figural emerges. From abstraction the figural arrives as a pure form, straddling the skin, at the point of interaction between the world and the body. At this point there are no forecasts and no memory, just the constant animation of the moment. To shift awareness to the limits of the skin, to externalise the subject, is to be close as possible to the world.