WHEN ARTS CREATE HAPPINESS / Caravaggio Terminal

 

Happiness. This is what I felt in the last couple of days. Long time had passed since I last felt this particular kind of happiness. It is not the one we could immediately think about, no, it is a kind of happiness which springs from that specific richness of emotions that only art can generate. Happy to be here, and now, to live a moment which will never be repeated, joy of feeling myself as a part of a whole. Happy to feel that love for art is, and has always been, something that lays inside the deepest me, it is something that makes the chords of my sentient soul vibrate.  

There will be people arguing that art is also something else, not only aimed at making us feel emotions. Renovation is also necessary because we should go beyond the traditional romantic conception of the artistic expression.  Nevertheless, I believe that even the most abstract, apparently unemotional, and illogic pieces of art can still stimulate not only reflection but also feelings.

The most recent events I followed at Interferences all touched me in a way that I will never forget are Botond Részegh’s paintings and the piece “Caravaggio Terminal” filled my being with emotions, questions, and joy.

After the launch of “Label curtain. A private theatrical dictionary” written by Gábor Tompa, who created a playful and subjective dictionary based on his professional relationship with the theatre, the opening of Botond Részegh’s exhibition “Nightfall” and catalogue launch at the Tranzit House were for me the occasion to discover a great painter and to experience deep emotions.

A real person inspired these works: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian oil magnate and oligarch who spent 17 years in prison for crimes he has committed, or for which he has been framed. It is not so important whether Khodorkovsky is really culpable or not, what seems to be essential to the full appreciation of the works is their exploration of “the imprisoned” human being. I believe indeed that the subject might be interpreted as a condition of physical, but also mental imprisonment.

The spectators can explore a gallery of psychological states which belong to a single, tormented character, whose physiognomy is not recognizable any longer, being the features almost lost in a dense tangle of brushstrokes and signs, which dramatically impress the canvas.   The head is sometimes reduced to a skull, other times is even torn in two in a fragmentation, which seems to evoke a sort of moral laceration. Perhaps it is a risky combination, but this laceration, together with the thick net of graphical signs that sometimes appears, vaguely reminds me of the fascinating and dramatic Tête d’otages created by Jean Fautrier in the 1940s.

Despite the fact that this undefined physiognomy of the portrayed character could prevent the painter from expressing feelings effectively, Részegh wonderfully succeeds and shows an outstanding ability to express a wide, various and intense emotional range which spans anger, loneliness, fear, melancholy, desperation, badness, and even indignation.

Részegh’s paintbrush is somewhere powerful, elsewhere delicate, but always leaves layers of colour whose density makes the canvas highly tactile and pregnant with expressivity. In some way, he also carves the canvas and by doing so he creates an even more dramatic effect. The palette is various; sometimes it is incandescent and makes the heads look like a sort of volcanic stones, like remains of a burning and shining lava flow. In other works colours are dark, put in a range of blacks and whites, browns and greys, which are rarely but surprisingly illuminated by purple or turquoise touches.

Always, a beautiful essentiality and conciseness of the shapes, which could come from Constantin Brancuși’s art, governs the representation and focuses, at the same time, the whole attention on the heads and their relationship with the space.

“Caravaggio Terminal” is a wonderful journey towards the last station of Caravaggio’s life. In this piece, Caravaggio is brilliantly represented as a contemporary artist who uses modern means of expression, such as tattoos and cameras.

As the set and costume designer Carmencita Brojboiu explained during the dialogue with the creators - the author András Visky and the director Robert Woodruff - the title itself suggests “the last phase in the life of every human being. Yet, an end can become a new beginning.”

The play mirrors András Visky’s fascinating poetical language and uncontainable love for Caravaggio, not only as an artist, but also as a courageous and independent man who chose to be faithful to his ideals and to live his life with marginalised people.

In the context of a widespread idealism in art, Caravaggio made a revolution. He changed the course of art by determining the transition, from the world of the myth, which belonged to the Renaissance, to the world of the reality, which is the modern world. Maurizio Calvesi, prominent Italian art historian, has highlighted indeed how Caravaggio’s works are pervaded by an imminent sense of reality. Caravaggio tried to represent the sacred stories not as if they were happening in a far and mythological past, but as actual, real, as if they were taking place in this precise moment, here and now.

As the creators explained, their aim was to translate the discomfort Caravaggio created with his works into a contemporary mode. Furthermore, András Visky explained how it has been important for him to show, in the play, the basic conflict between institutionalised faith and religion; and how a private revelation, like the one Caravaggio had, is not necessarily tied to moral issues. Even “if the person is not a statue of morality, still can have private revelations.”

There are touching moments in the play, for example when Caravaggio, after dissecting his father’s body in his anxiety to find where the soul lays, discovers and admires the lungs through which words vibrate and like in a sort of rapture, the painter says that men do not need wings to fly, because they already fly with words. I also admired the depth and tenderness of the angels, personified by the prostitutes, and who teach Caravaggio to walk on the water in Porto Ercole, where the great painter died mysteriously in 1610.

Caravaggio Terminal

Theater. It is the place where human expectations, frustrations, tragedy and joy coexist. The only place where the inner feelings of the mind are shown with no pity or shame; it is the only place where hypocrisy and moral are not admitted; it is the only place where human beings are free.

When walked in the Sala Studio, a cosy theater studio in the Hungarian theater, I noticed that everyone was in an unusual silence, while siding a cellophane wall. Only when I sat on my chair I understood that the cellophane wall was actually the stage. The cellophane was wrapping the all acting area, as it was to keep it uncontaminated. The lights on the audience went down, through the transparent curtain I could see seven bodies, lying on mortuary trollies.

When the curtain opened on Caravaggio Terminal my everyday life was far away, my feelings were grabbed by the scene. The drama is a whole life metaphor, through Caravaggio’s life, the author, Visky Andràs, takes the audience to disclose the most inner fears. Visky Andràs force the spectators to face their own demons. The actors on the stage slips through feelings of surprise, agony, anguish, beauty, defeat; Caravaggio is surrounded by it’s painting characters and his family, in a kind of dreaming reality. The painter’s friends are the same poor and damned people taken from the abandon suburbs, the same social outcasts that through Caravaggio’s hand become the most high and worshipped characters; a kind of revenge against the hypocritical world of power of the church.

The writing is passionate and riveting, the scene is bare, the lights and the actors bodies make the audience build up the scene, in an eternal hug. The physical side takes an important part in the drama, the actors are called to express themselves at their most abilities, this drama is what any actor would love to perform at least once in his/her life, and not just for the drama itself but for the chance of express all the acting skill in one go. On the stage I saw the power of an alchemy between the author, the actors and the director, Robert Woodruff, who with extreme wit has painted the audience’s imagination. The contemporary aspect is taken in by the use of modern devices, and if I normally think about the use of modern devises as an useless forcing, this time everything was in its place and had a real reason to be on the scene, I have to say that the actors’ self-confidence and naturalness played an important role on it. The complexity of the human being’s nature is given in a simple way, which transform a dark reality in a pure and unattainable place. Caravaggio in its obsessive research of Soul and Purity takes the spectators to introspect themselves. They walk through the wild forest of their Ego, it is when the writer, the director and the actors bring the audience to a “no-exit” place, where Peace and Holy have a different meaning and characteristics, in an up-side-down World.A dream in a dream wisely painted by the actors expressive bodies and voices, I can say that I put my head in a “torso” searching for Eternity and I found out that the answer is in Caravaggio’s paintings.