The installation of La Vida es Sueño consists of fourteen metal hospital beds, reclining, placed side by side along the Gallery (Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta, Parma, Italy), in clear mirroring with the sculptural groups and large late seventeenth-century canvases depicting Lamentations, Depositions and Annunciations and in close material dialogue with the imposing sky-trestle in innocent tubes created by the architect Guido Canali in the seventies, at the time of the renovation of the Pilotta in the name of a museum space understood as «a system that must necessarily exhibit its mechanisms».
Wedged between dream and awakening, the sanitary cot – stripped of mattresses and sheets – evokes not only the suspended time of agony, the fissure between life and death, but also the bed of mental hospital restraint, a residual place where the only possible space of freedom is in dream life.
On the three empty exhibition walls that run along the thirty-five meters of the North Gallery are imprinted the imagoturgies in which the figure of Job, from the painting by Antonio de Pereda present in an adjacent room, overlaps with those of some auto sacramental performers. They are figures who, transfiguring themselves into each other, can compose a new painting, between reality and dream, which includes entrances and exits between the two doors of life. A painting among the paintings which, however, will be short-lived, only the temporary time of a representation.
Our Man, for self-sacramental, will have the features of an adolescent in the same posture as the painting: holding the shard, his hand resting on his heart and his gaze turned upwards, towards God. The difference between the fixity of the picture in the penitent figure of Job and the movement of the Man/Child, in the young body of those who look towards the future, will act as a distinction between the freedom granted whether or not to betray the Faith and the freedom to be conquered as life progresses. What is the boundary between the free will of one and the other?
