Pontormium Fleshmind
Hangar teatri, Trieste, December 2025
VR work in progress
The astropoetic intention
Pontormium Fleshmind is an evolving matrix of performative ritual in mixed reality, designed to regenerate lost works originating from pre-actionism or the early stages of body art.
It explores the potential of digital reinterpretation and regeneration applied to a lost masterpiece of Mannerism: Jacopo da Pontormo’s fresco cycle, originally painted for the choir of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence between 1546 and 1556.
This work, destroyed in the 18th century, depicted naked figures with soft, interwoven forms, sliding over one another like reptiles. These varied bodies, in their diverse morphologies, were immersed in a state of collective ecstasy, embodying a radical vision of the Last Judgment: a vertiginous fall of clinging bodies tumbling into viscous abysses, clutching one another in terror.
Described by his contemporaries as an “excess of flesh” and an “ecstatic excess of death,” this fresco conveyed Pontormo’s hallucinatory vision—haunted by scenes even Dante could never have imagined. Celebrated for its expressive power as much as it was condemned for transgressing the pictorial and moral norms of its time, it remains a mythical work.
Based on the few surviving preparatory drawings and entries from Pontormo’s personal diary, Pontormium FleshMind offers a performative matrix where body digitization, performative interaction, and mixed realities intertwine.
By exploring the interfaces between materiality and invisible realities, this digital ritual engages a reflection on the nature of lost artworks and their potential to be reborn in contemporary forms. This structure weaves together programmed arts, the hybrid dimensions of digital creation, and corporeality as a field for critical and aesthetic experimentation.
Through a cyber-archaeological approach, it revisits historical corporeal practices through a contemporary digital and performative lens.
Pontormo Laboratory
Towards a transmuting fresco
Excerpt from the Diary Movie of Jacopo da Pontormo. Speculative film in progress, created with the help of a video-based artificial intelligence. Directed from the diary of Jacopo da Pontormo, Florentine Mannerist painter. Written between 1554 and 1556, this text is here reinterpreted through a contemporary, pre-actionist lens, where Mannerist visions take shape within an imaginary and transhistorical fiction.
3D scans of the Basilica. Visualization of 3D scans of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, transplanted into the heart of a Tuscan landscape, along with its white interior designed to host the future fresco of corporeal fusion, inspired by Jacopo da Pontormo’s San Lorenzo cycle.
3D studies for the reconstitution of bodies
Metapaintings of the Triestine transmutation ritual
Credits
Regenerative and pre-actionist numerical performance of: David Legrand
3D development and modeling: Etienne Muller
Stagiaires 3D : Chloé Hereau et Colombe Delacoste
Sound design : Philippe Zunino
Curator : Paola Pisani
Location: Trieste | Gruppo 78 | Corpo in trasformazione | 2025
production: Gruppo 78 (Italie)
With the support of the Drac Nouvelle Aquitaine (individual aid for creation 2022)
