LUCI DI CARNI

Caravaggio howls at the moon; the wolf is cut by the same light.
Hands that tell, at once, the story of thought and the evolution of paw and claw.
And that vein—that tension of faces and mortal life—concrete, arrested there on the canvas by the visions of Merisi.
Bruno de Franceschi

Luci di carni is a creation for five performers, born from suggestions and resonances drawn from the work of Michelangelo Merisi, universally known as Caravaggio.

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

Light in the history of forgotten, ordinary bodies, now brought into the foreground exactly as they are.

Light and flesh, precisely.

Caravaggio begins his revolution in stillness and meditation. In his work, he draws the viewer closer, placing his subjects in a “no-place.” Out of nothingness, the extreme evidence of what is depicted leaps forward. At times, it seems as though the figures emerge directly from the darkness of the scene.

Bodies are—and then fade—only to appear again in their full concreteness, within a play of volumes: stripped bodies, primal flavors, cutting through space, swaying, searching in a drunken air for the capture of their own shameless nakedness. Moments irradiated by risk and absence.

From a continuous and dense flow of movement, dualities surface and collide: animality and technique, ephemerality and seduction, light and shadow.

Beauty. Language.
The hands of Merisi on the canvas: body/hand, verse.
Those hands—I want to pull them out of there.

As plastically alive as the protagonists of Caravaggio’s paintings appear before our eyes, so mysterious and obscure remain, for us, the theatres of his personality.