MACRO Testaccio
Padiglione 9A
MACRO Testaccio will open a show by renown Viennese artist and filmmaker Edgar Honetschläger entitled LOS FELIZ in association with the Cineteca Nazionale who will host the Italian film premiere of the feature-length movie LOS FELIZ and the XXX who will offer additional screenings.
The exhibition and the film screenings will provide an insight into an outstanding project that took the artist and film maker 15 years to realize. Out of those Honetschläger spent three and a half years in order to paint and draw iconographic images of the land of the free. A section of this very comprehensive oeuvre that consists of 18 Japanese ink paintings each 4x16m (13x51 feet) and some 250 drawings – some as big as 5x8m (15x25ft) will be presented at MACRO Testaccio at Hall 9A. In the movie LOS FELIZ the huge paintings are transported by a specially made machine that creates the illusion of a car driving through American landscapes. This rolling panorama machine of huge dimensions – that discloses the mechanism behind the production of the film – will be presented as an installation.
Christianity is the only religion that has made imagery the principal source of its persuasive power. Building on this fact, Edgar Honetschläger’s LOS FELIZ posits “Those who make the pictures rule the world” and consistently connects the two capital cities of picture production/manipulation: Rome/the Vatican with Los Angeles/Hollywood. But there is a force that wants to challenge this supremacy of the West… Like the genesis the feature film LOS FELIZ has a seven-day structure - the first day taking place in Rome, the last one in Los Angeles, the five days in between being a road trip from East to West coast portraying a two-dimensional, black and white America laying out the classic iconography of American road movies. LOS FELIZ packs the vastness of the North American continent into one room. A fairy tail, both comedy and drama that caricatures the global omnipresence of Western imagery and Hollywood pictures with humor and irony, although it does not forget to make fun of itself, the illusion film and the genre road movie.
The artist / film director on the movie:
"The movie fulfills itself in Los Feliz – the central region of Los Angeles, abutting Hollywood, noted for its expensive historic homes and celebrity inhabitants – where the protagonist encounters her alter ego, who is desperately seeking fame. Los Angeles knows no seasons – reason why the film industry moved there – permanent blue skies, watersprinklers, manicured gardens. Whenever you look out of the window nothing changes - ever. The only thing that changes is you. You look into the mirror - a new wrinkle! Los Angeles' permanence cannot encompass humans. That is why the beauty industry is dominating its inhabitants. The promise of eternal youth is programmatic and Hollywood films have been transporting this ideology to the rest of the world for decades."
Edgar Honetschläger, born and raised in Austria, is an artist and film-maker who spent five years in the USA, twelve years in Japan, three years in Italy and a year in Brazil. He participated in Documenta X among major international museums as well as the Berlinale and Cannes Film Festival, among hundreds of film festivals around the globe.