ARCHIVES 2011 / Sul concetto di volto nel Figlio di Dio

The atmosphere of  Sul concetto di volto nel Figlio di Dio recalls that of Purgatory: the same cosy living room, the same slice of ordinary daily life treated as a sequence shot without any framing whatsoever. An old man is glued to his TV, wearing head-phones, and his son, a bachelor, gets ready to leave for work. However, an anomaly has slipped in at the back of the stage: a huge portrait of Christ - an enlargement of Antonello da Messina's Salvator Mundi - whose ardent gaze watches over the scene in the half-light. Gradually, according to the codes of stark realism, the spotless living room becomes the centre of a less and less controllable disorder. In a time that seems to falter, every gesture of the son for the father is felt as a genuine cause that must be embraced, as though he were calling for the support of the whole audience. His patience and his pity, his love and his anger, even his hate as his powerlessness to overcome the crisis is revealed, arouse an empathy mixed with dread. JLP