Inferno

2020



Video loop, 31 mn 19.

Two different versions of Inferno exist within Teorema video series. The first, according to the principle of most of the portraits of the series, offers, by effects of overprint, a dialogue between the hospitalization scene of Odetta in Theorem which marks the term of its journey and the details of the Judith beheading Holofernes kept in Rome in the collections of the Barberini Palace. The second works on the principle of a diptych to make the same film excerpt interact with the two variants which would have been made by Caravaggio on the biblical subject, involving, in parallel with the version of the Barberini Palace, that known as Toulouse discovered in an attic in 2014, before being acquired by the american businessman and art collector J. Tomilson Hill in a context of resounding media treatment.

Through this structuring, the video editing pushes the viewer to compare the two versions of the painting. But more than he seeks to underline the disparities, he experiences, in view of the controversies that animated the world of art at the time of its discovery, the authenticity of the Toulouse composition with the scientific prism that the film would offer. In accordance with the nature of the selected film excerpt and the back and forth effects offered by the editing, it points to the research mechanisms put in place, the hesitations it generates and the nature of the conclusions that can result from it. By browsing from one part of the diptych to another, the viewer is pushed in the posture of the expert and directly asked to make his own judgment.

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Copyright © 2016 Laurent Fiévet