Video loop, 33 mn.
Young Girl with Guitar is part of a set of four video editings from the Teorema video series operating on the principle of the diptych. In two of them – Girl with Guitar and Seize Him! -, a brief excerpt of Theorem, edited back and forth, is used as a narrative framework on which the same details of two variants of the same Caravaggio painting parade two by two, in a play of transparency – in this case, the two Lute Player versions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hermitage collections – and those of a related painting – The Musicians from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The symmetry constructed between the two parts of the diptychs makes it possible to highlight the variations, sometimes subtle, distinguishing the three works. Above all, it marks their propensity to resonate differently in the links woven with the shots of the film to carry out the musical metaphor proposed in Young Girl with Guitar. This dialogue is sometimes disturbed to construct a new interpretation of the images used, in a harmonic construction freed from the analytical process put in place.
Young Girl with Guitar introduces into the dialogue proposed between cinema and painting an indirect reference to Georges Braque and Pablo Pablo Picasso who took up the same type of subject at the beginning of the 1910s. Without copying the aesthetics, the montage offers an extension of the principles of analytical cubism in which the two artists distinguished themselves at the time.
By emphasizing the gestures of the figures, the video editing exacerbates the tactile dimensions at work in the paintings and highlight their emotional impacts.
