Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa

Featuring a host of absurd and abstract characters—including Thin Anxiety, Curtains, Silence, and The Onion—Picasso’s play was excessive and transgressive. In restaging it as a psychedelic ‘happening’, Lebel presented an anarchistic, subversive commentary on the dominant social structures of his own time.

Bertoli’s project is all about revisiting or restaging history, and his choice of Picasso’s play is significant. Written against the backdrop of wartime Paris, Surrealism, and psychoanalysis, it was already informed by themes from classical Greek literature, including Plato’s Symposium. Drawing on a range of archival documents, anecdotes, and visual motifs, Bertoli’s ‘spatial collage’ recontextualises the play in the present to create a ‘continuous moment’ through and across time.

Damiano Bertoli is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane, and Neon Parc, Melbourne.