The video editings of the Teorema video series work to weave a network of correspondences between short fragments of the homonymous film by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema, 1968) and different religious paintings of Western Europe. They are the direct continuation of previous works and video series (Hitchcockian Suites, New Suites, States of Grace) which elaborate the same kind of articulation between painting and cinema.
Beside the main 90-minute video editing that revisits the images of a photographic album by the prism of compositions of Descent from the Cross, Pietà and Burial of Jesus painted in Europe between the 15th and the 19th century, and a shorter one devoted to various evocations of the Annunciation of the Italian Renaissance, the series gathers video loops that constitute portraits of the main characters of the film – Lucia (Silvana Mangano), Paolo (Massimo Girotti), Odetta (Anne Wiazemsky), Pietro ( Andrés José Cruz), Emilia (Laura Betti) -, including the dog of the family, who fate will change following the meeting with the character played in Teorema by Terence Stamp. Each of them is presented in a short excerpt of the film, restructured by repeated back-and-forth effects, articulated to one or two series of details of Caravaggio paintings.
To this series of intimate portraits, in the presence or in absence of Terence Stamp, the series combines other video loops that constitute, by contrast to the first, scenes gathering all the protagonists. They are equally associated to details of paintings of Caravaggio.
The ensemble highlights, through its very process of confrontation between cinema and painting, the radical nature of the naturalist approaches observed by the filmmaker and the painter. It imposes, by the very structuring of the series, a careful re-reading of Teorema by the filter of all the references summoned. But beyond this process of redeployment, it guides more simply the analysis of the images used in a scientific approach, sometimes almost clinical, or even didactic when it comes to dealing with questions of composition or codes of representation. While leaving equal room for possible effects of wonder, glare or sideration, echoing the spirit of the various models on which the video series is based, they help to awaken our observation capacity. As much as the construction of images, it is indeed our own gaze in front of the work of art and its possible progression through analysis that is questioned.
