THEORETICAL OBSERVATORY

Attention some images could offend your sensitivity 🔞

"Last Supper" (Installation). The twelve apostles in a joint reaction 1 phase-2 phase. Real size. Container, 12 wires, offal, vomit. 1998-2000 ©

The installation "Last Supper" arises from the need to bring to light that dimension of the sacred which traditional representations have progressively removed: the physical reaction to emotional pain as an authentic manifestation of spiritual experience. The vomit contained in the central barrel is not gratuitous provocation but a phenomenological fact that reveals the profound interconnection between body and soul, between spiritual suffering and somatic manifestation. When emotional pain reaches its maximum intensity, the body reacts with an involuntary act of expulsion: vomit represents the organism’s inability to retain or metabolize an experience that exceeds its capacity for processing. It is the moment when the Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans collapses, revealing the psychosomatic unity of the human being. The installation materializes this process: the twelve iron wires radiating from the central container toward the perimeter walls represent not only the apostles but also the force lines of pain propagating through space, transforming the environment into a field of emotional tension.

The physical presence of vomit in the barrel constitutes a reverse phenomenological reduction: instead of eliminating empirical data to grasp the essence, it eliminates aesthetic superstructures to return religious experience to its most immediate and carnal dimension. The reference to the Last Supper is not accidental: it represents the moment when the pain of imminent separation becomes physically unbearable, when the announcement of betrayal and death transforms the community of disciples into a community of suffering. Smell, the most primitive and least rationally controllable sense, here becomes an instrument of involuntary participation in the experience of pain. It is impossible “not to smell,” impossible to maintain that critical distance which aesthetic education normally guarantees. The work forces a communitas of discomfort that erases cultural and social hierarchies: in the face of the odor of decomposition, all present become bodies that react, regardless of their symbolic capital or intellectual preparation.

The second phase of the installation—"the communion of pain through smell"—reveals the most radical dimension of the work: the transformation of the exhibition space into a place of direct experience rather than aesthetic contemplation. The process of biological decomposition introduces a temporality that escapes the control of both artist and viewer: the work happens independently of human will, following the biological laws of putrefaction. Here, the deepest dimension of the sacred emerges: not as a cultural construction but as an event that imposes itself in its natural necessity. The reaction of ecclesiastical authorities reveals the inability of the religious institution to recognize authentic manifestations of the sacred when they appear outside established codifications. The Church, in its process of aestheticization and ritualization, has lost contact with that rawer dimension of spiritual experience that characterized medieval mystics and finds its most authentic expressions in mystical literature. Saint Teresa of Avila, in describing her experience of transverberation, does not hide the physical dimension of spiritual pain: “The pain of the wound was so intense that it made me utter those moans.”

Last Supper. Installation. Container, twelve wires, offal, vomit. 1998-2000

The installation traces a genealogy of sacred art that connects Caravaggio, Bernini, and contemporary experience in a single line of inquiry: the necessity of representing the sacred through the most concrete dimension of human experience. But while Caravaggio used the visual metaphor of dirty feet and Bernini the sculptural metaphor of ecstasy, here the metaphor becomes reality: vomit is vomit, odor is odor, decomposition is decomposition. There is no aesthetic mediation that can soften the direct impact of the experience. The censorship of the work reveals a society that has lost the ability to confront the most authentic dimensions of religious experience. Sacred art has been progressively sterilized, transformed into decoration or moral edification, losing that function of ontological shock which characterized the most intense manifestations of the sacred. The installation restores to religious art its dimension of scandal in the etymological sense of the term: skandalon, a stumbling stone that forces one to stop, to question, to challenge one’s certainties. Vomit as a physical manifestation of emotional pain thus becomes a metaphor for the human condition before the sacred: the impossibility of retaining, possessing, or controlling an experience that by its nature exceeds the capacities of rational understanding. It is the ultimate frontier of existential honesty: the moment when the body tells the truth that the mind cannot formulate, when the physiological reaction reveals the authenticity of an experience that words cannot describe. The installation exposes the profound contradictions of a civilization that has removed the dimension of the body from the sphere of the sacred, in a society that has medicalized pain and psychologized suffering.

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Last Supper. Installation. Detail. 1998-2000

References

Physiological psychology

The entire act of vomiting is controlled by a nerve center located in the bulb. Vomiting is a reflex act, a symptom whose evolution essentially depends on the cause, and can occur as a result of violent emotions, such as emotion, excitement, impression, trepidation, upset. Or to psychic influences. Feelings of anxiety dictated by fear of something or the imminent loss of someone. Sense of unease, a negative effect that in a community or a collectivity results in the disappearance of one of its members. Vision of traumatizing things and episodes. Sudden psychic trauma shock. Often as an indication of psychological rejection. (Treccani).

Historical references 1 (Michelangelo Merisi - Caravaggio)

Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio 1571-1610) "St. Matthew and the Angel 1 version -1602 c.ca" and "The Madonna of the pilgrims - 1604-1606". The work of St. Matthew and the Angel 1 version was rejected because it was defined as indecorous and vulgar. Caravaggio rather than representing the Saint as a strong and vigorous apostle describes him as a humble old illiterate not even able to write. The scene shows us any poor peasant with his legs crossed in the foreground, his feet dirty, callused and without a halo on his head. "Because he had no dignity, nor the appearance of a saint, sitting with his legs crossed and his feet roughly exposed to the people" (Bellori). Atmospheres far from those to which the church and society were accustomed until then. The work was considered a real scandal. Offensive and blasphemous towards the church and patrons. The Madonna dei Pellegrini was also considered scandalous. Caravaggio decides to use Maddalena Antognetti, a prostitute, to represent the Madonna. Also in this case the pilgrims are represented as farmers. The details of dirty, muddy and swollen feet are highlighted. The earth that has made the extremities of these poor people unpresentable is an element that is read only in negative. Dirt is linked to poverty. Virgo cannot be approached with dirty people. Caravaggio's intention, not understood, was not to provoke. Rather to bring all men closer to God, both peasants and rich people. In both works, holiness is not perceived in the external aspect, considered obscene, but in the interior feeling of meekness and ingenuity, symptoms of grace and faith. Attributes of the saints, not their appearance, which was abused at the time with rhetorical and excessive externalizations.

Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio) “The Madonna of the Pilgrims - 1604-1606”. Detail

Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio). "St. Matthew and the Angel 1 version -1602 c.ca".

Historical references 2 (Gian Lorenzo Bernini)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) "The Transverbation of Saint Teresa of Avila - 1652". Better known as "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa", it describes the communion of the Saint with God. It is a conceptual unit that Bernini unfolded in such a way that every detail acquired a meaning as a whole. «[…] Bernini's great innovation in dealing with transverberation, that is, sensual content, has been the subject of an endless controversy. Teresa's vision has also been interpreted as eroticism induced by hysteria, and already in his time Bernini was accused of having debased transverberation by reducing it to a vulgarly physical level. A contemporary of his condemned him because "he then threw that most pure Virgin to earth ... not only prostrate (also noting that she was not on her knees!), But a prostitute". Whether or not Teresa was hysterical and Bernini was vulgar or not, the group emanates a physical eroticism that well-intentioned apologists are wrong to deny. According to a millenary tradition, born with the biblical Canticle of Songs, mystics used the vocabulary of physical love in an effort to transmit their feelings to others: communion with God is like communion with the loved one, only multiplied more and more. many times. Teresa herself emphasized the purely physical component of the experience. Describing the transverberation, she affirms that, although the sweet pain she suffered was spiritual and not physical, the body also had part in it, indeed a large part - these are her words. Bernini's visualization can be partly explained by Teresa's account, which is extremely vivid »(Irving Lavin). Since it is humanly impossible to depict the moment of intense mystical ecstasy, the artist decides to represent it metaphorically through the moment of absolute pleasure for the human being. Carnal ecstasy. Orgasm. In fact, the ambiguous and sensual beauty of the two protagonists evokes the erotic drive. The orgasmic intercourse. The Saint herself in her "Life" in 1565 describes that moment of voluptuous rapture with these words: "In this vision it pleased the Lord that I saw him like this: he was not big, but small and very beautiful, with his face so bright as to look like one angels very high in the hierarchy who seem to burn all in divine ardor: I believe they are those called cherubs, because the names do not repeat to me, but I clearly see that in the sky there is so much difference between angels and angels, and between one and the other of them, that I don't know how to express myself. I saw in his hands a long golden dart, which seemed to me to have a bit of fire on the iron tip. It seemed that he pushed it into my heart several times, so deeply that it reached my bowels, and when he pulled it out he seemed to take it away, leaving me all inflamed with great love of God. The pain of the wound was so alive that it made me emit those groans of which I have spoken, but the sweetness that this enormous pain infused in me was so great, that there was no wish for its end, nor could the soul be satisfied with anything other than God. It is not a physical pain, but a spiritual one, even if the body does not neglect to participate in it a little, indeed a lot. It is such a sweet idyll that takes place between the soul and God, that I beg the divine goodness to let those who think I lie try it ".

Gian Lorenzo Bernini. "The Transverbation of Saint Teresa of Avila - 1652". Detail.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini. "The Transverbation of Saint Teresa of Avila - 1652".

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