also on May 17, 2013 21:00

The human face hasn’t always managed to find its real aspect and it’s the painter’s task to give it one.
Antonin Artaud

Thanks to this unique, almost ritual performance, Olivier de Sagazan obtains a transformation in the movement of the face, that second by second loses its human traits. The epurated staging focus the audience’s attention on the artist, who is alone on the stage, with some clay only. A new face, a new forming and deforming identity, is modeled right below our eyes. This is already a mutation, a metamorphosis which sympathizes with enormity in order to try and reveal his hidden eccentricity. The plastic artist spectacularly overturns the existence of the character he is personifying, a common employee agonizing to find his real identity.
This enthusiasm for decomposition lets us foresee the basic need to remove taboos from this “sacred face” in order to go back to an ordinary “flesh head”, as Deleuze said about the figures painted by the artist Francis Bacon.
The expressiveness of this action, performed in front of the audience, provokes people’s conscience and reminds both the intense fragility of the face and its motivating unnameability.
A real catharsis which is experienced far from covered paths and recreates the face of an incredibly hybrid and turbulent world!

Fascinated by this performance, Ron Fricke, director of Baraka and director of photography of Koyaanisqatsi, has integrated it in his last movie Samsara, as a revealing element of a society which swings towards different societal paradigms.