LUCI DI CARNI

“Caravaggio howls at the moon; the wolf is cut by the same light. Hands that simultaneously narrate thought and the evolution of paw and claw. And that vein, that tension of faces and mortal, tangible life, fixed there upon the canvas by the visions of Merisi.”
Bruno de Franceschi

Luci di carni (Lights of Flesh) is a creation for five performers born from visual and poetic suggestions inspired by the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, universally known as Caravaggio.

Light. Shadow. And then light again — light even within shadow, passing through the volume of bodies, their intensity and concrete reality.

Light within the story of forgotten, ordinary bodies, suddenly brought into the foreground exactly as they are.

Light and flesh, precisely.

Caravaggio begins his revolution through stillness and contemplation. In his work, he draws the viewer closer, placing his subjects within “no-place.” Out of nothingness, the radical evidence of what is represented bursts into the foreground. At times, it seems as though the figures emerge directly from the darkness of the stage.

Bodies “exist,” then fade away, only to reappear once again in their material concreteness through a play of volumes: naked bodies, primal sensations cutting through space, swaying, searching within an intoxicated air for the fearless revelation of their own nudity — moments irradiated by risk and absence.

From a continuous and dense movement emerge dualities such as animality and technique, ephemerality and seduction, light and shadow.

Beauty. Language. Merisi’s hands upon the canvas: the body-hand, the verse.
Those hands — I want to pull them out from there.

As sculptural and full of life as the protagonists of Caravaggio’s paintings appear before our eyes, so mysterious and obscure remain for us the theatres of his inner world.