Luxembourg. The influence of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) on the world of the arts goes far beyond the world of theater. Some have made it the precursor of performance. Others have drawn on it for their plastic creations. He himself, a visual artist, left a series of paintings and drawings, companions to his thoughts and writings. For Artaud, the theater of cruelty must turn away from reason and narration in favor of the body, the senses and extreme emotions. Cruelty is to be taken as a form of intensity which responds to the crudity of existence and death where art takes on the dimension of a sacred rite.
When language becomes visual
Faced with the radicality of Artaud’s thought, the question of the transition from words to forms and images arises. Curator Agnes Gryczkowska responds to this through the choice of artists and mediums, but also through the scenography. The walls hung with heavy black curtains, the suspended and unhung works take us away from the “white room” and the wall hangings, offering the spectator-visitor another perception, close in certain respects to a theatrical space where the stage has disappeared. The experience of trance is what offers Cream Cut 1 & 2 (2024-2025), the works of Pan Daijing (who also created the musical carpet for this first room). The large black formats covered with glyphs drawn in chalk are vestiges of a performance which impose their enigmatic presence here.
Pan Daijing, Cream Cut 1 & Cream Cut 2(2024-2025); Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), The Revolt of the Angels Emerging from Limbo (1946), Man and his pain(1946), The Totem(1945-1946), view of the exhibition “Thea
© Marc Domage
Rarely shown, the drawings that Antonin Artaud made during his stay in the Rodez psychiatric institution in the mid-1940s are like the open wounds of his mind and body in the face of madness and confinement. The decorative elements designed by the Polish playwright and theorist Tadeusz Kantor for his plays here acquire a presence and a disturbing and sinister autonomy evoking both instruments of torture and treatment accessories ready to subject the bodies to forced rituals.
With his drawings and his dolls twisted with fabrics immersed in mud and bodily fluids, Michel Nedjar suggests the intensity and urgency of a rite between art and exorcism. A room is reserved for a string of video screens broadcasting extracts from Tragedia Endogonidia (2002-2004) by Romeo Castellucci, presented for several years in different cities in different forms. Images where, as in an organic impulse, violence rubs shoulders with innocence, and absurdity responds to brutality. Take Half, I Have Nothing Left (2025), the labyrinth imagined by Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard is an invitation to the experience of disorientation, the loss of the senses and freedom. At the bend of claustrophobic plywood corridors, we discover cramped rooms populated with mannequins which we observe through a small opening, absurd and derisory puppets of a humanity, subject of an experience which goes beyond it. The cruelty is internal.
