FULL INFERNO de ROMEO CASTELLUCCI (Scott Gibbons) Avignon 2008

Inferno is a monument of pain. The artist must pay. In a dark wood in which he is immediately plunged, he doubts, he fears, he suffers. But what sin is the artist guilty of? If he is thus lost, it is because he does not know the answer to this question. Alone on the large stage, or on the contrary, walled in by the crowd and confronted with the world’s hubbub, the man that Romeo Castellucci puts on stage fully suffers, bewildered from this experience of loss of self. Everything here aggresses him, the violence of the images, the fall of his own body into matter, the animals and spectres. The visual dynamic of this show possesses the consistency of this stupor, sometimes this dread, that seizes the man when he is reduced to his paltriness, defenceless faced with the elements that overwhelm him. But this fragility is a resource, however, because it is the condition of a paradoxical gentleness. Romeo Castellucci shows each spectator that at the bottom of his own fears there is a secret space, marked by melancholy, in which he hangs on to life, to “the incredible nostalgia of his own life”. This Inferno is also the first encounter between Romeo Castellucci and the Cour d’honneur of the Popes’ Palace. The artist dreamed of it, the artist who had already written about this site three years ago: “We wanted to imagine a series of events, an occupation of the space, that would be capable of meeting this architecture, not as scenery but as the mythic past claiming to be taken up once again and resuscitated, as the achievement of what remained uncompleted, extravagant, aborted”. And finally, here is Romeo Castellucci faced with the impossible, desired and dreaded. Put to the challenge.