Video loop, 29 mn.
Portrait d’Odetta – The Sacrifice confronts the two versions which would have been made by Caravaggio of the same biblical episode of Genesis at two different periods of the painter’s career: the version of Sacrifice of Isaac belonging to the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, who was commanded to him around 1603 by Cardinal Maffo Barberini, and that, anterior of ten years and with more disputed attribution, of the Barbara Piasecka Johnston collection of Princeton, which some imagine by Bartolomeo Cavarazzi .
By browsing from one version to another, the video editing highlights the disparities of the two paintings and celebrates their formal singularities in a device that is both visual and sound, insisting on the musicality of their respective compositions. Showing Odetta kneeling in front of a chest from which she extracts objects loudly, it invites the veiwer to follow her example to search the foundations of the images and to best exercise his sense of analysis, despite the evocation of an impossible sorting denouncing the difficulty of the exercise.
On the sidelines of Sacrifice of Isaac, the video summons other works of Caravaggio, among which the different versions of the Lute player takes over in the diptych Young lady with Guitar. Through these more implicit references, it points out the central role that plays a sense of touch there.
