FEUILLETON - THE SEVEN CAPITAL SINS

Feuilleton - The seven capital sins is the main video installation realised by Angel Vergara for the Belgian pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Feuilleton reminds us of certain great novels from the 19th century, published in episodes at the bottom of front pages of the newspapers: among others, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas contributed to the birth of this literary genre which was directly related to the emergence of a popular culture. Feuilleton also reminds us of radio dramas, stories that one could follow in magazines, comic strips, soap operas and, today, televised series of all sorts, without forgetting the daily news, this global Feuilleton whose images do not cease to occupy our screens and to confront us with a more and more virtual reality.
In Vergara’s Feuilleton, Colère (Wrath), Avarice (Greed), Paresse (Sloth), Orgueil (Pride), Luxure (Lust), Envie (Envy) and Gourmandise (Gluttony) are in one sense characters who serve as a framework in a merely incidental narration. They are also recurrent ideas in a culture of the forbidden and of transgression, of a perpetually revised morality. In the Belgian Pavilion in Venice, aligned in a half-lit room, the seven capital sins were depicted on seven screens. These seven video montages are short sequences or paintings in action which impose their rhythm and capture everyone’s attention. Consciously or not, they project us into a well-coded universe: coming out of the televisual universe’s permanent flux, they are assembled as one would assemble credits, but these seven videos are however the same, they play with repetition, a refrain, yet each of them diverge from the others, they are different in their sameness. These images do not justify their existence through an environment that would justify them as proof, but through a bundle of clues that end up overlapping and neutralizing each other. They blend into space and time, activating and then freezing themselves into indefinable contours, but finally they melt into a single gaze.