Emilia's Portrait - Prophecy

2019



Video loop, 24 mn.

By articulating between them the two versions of the same subject tackled by Caravaggio – the two versions of Salome with the Head of John the Baptist in the collections of the Palazzo Reale in Madrid and those of the National Gallery in London-, Portrait of Emilia – Prophecy engages, in the same way as Portrait of Odetta – the Sacrifice, a back and forth movement between two pictorial references that literally seem to illustrate the displacements of the characters in space.

Carrieed by the Cisitor from the corner of the kitchen where she folded back to the cramped room which serves as her bedroom, Emilia seems to undergo this stretch between the two paintings directly, as if it was imposed on her models by force. Doubly beheaded by the frame and the reference to the fate of John the Baptist that the video editing uses as a reference, the servant is only the shadow of herself and seems victim of a process of interposition which exceeds her.

The analytical movement initiated within the confrontation of the image registers imposes its directives on the character in a movement of irrepressible deviations which prevails, to her defending body, in opposite directions.

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Copyright © 2016 Laurent Fiévet