La forma humana

For his new show, Pablo Messiez draws on two artistic experiences that deeply shake him: reading Francis Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester and the novel The Carnivorous Lamb, by Agustín Gómez Arcos.

From Bacon, he takes the idea that the subject should not speak louder than the work, and that art should work with the specific materials of its language in order to reach sensation directly.

Faced with the impossibility of adapting Gómez Arcos’s novel for the stage, Messiez decides not to reproduce its plot or its characters, but to use it as a trigger, as Bacon did with Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X. His theatrical research therefore focuses on the intensities, relationships and traces left on him by that reading. The work is born out of this intersection between painting, literature and the stage. Time, space, gaze, presence and bodies become theatrical material in an attempt to create an ephemeral experience, yet one capable of enduring in the memory of those who watch.