Corps Allongé

Following several performances built around extreme confinement and waiting, I came across a painting: The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger. It stayed with me for a long time. Its proportions are very unusual: two metres long and only thirty centimetres high. Christ appears as a corpse laid out, gaunt, greenish, eyes rolled back, mouth open.

The realism of this painting, made in 1522, was deeply shocking. In his novel The Idiot, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky conveys his reaction through his character Myshkin: « But that painting might make some people lose their faith! » Christ shown through his suffering alone.

« The unadorned depiction of human death, the almost anatomical laying bare of the corpse, conveys to the viewer an unbearable anguish before the death of God, here merged with our own death, so absent is the slightest suggestion of transcendence. » writes Julia Kristeva in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia.

The viewer sees the death of Christ, no longer the son of God but that of man, their own death. A way of seeing humanity from a distance.