Artaud’s Visual Language: Genealogies and Intricacies

Abstract

According to the most recent methods pertaining to “Visual Studies”, the text aims at analyzing the concept of “Visual language” elaborated by Artaud in some of his fundamental interventions gathered in The theatre and its double, that was subsequently reproposed during the whole of his opera. This concept not only puts him in a profound antagonistic role with the most common and diffused theatrical practice of the time, but it adventures him beyond a theater space intended in the most radical and experimental sense, instead, it draws him closer to the figurative arts through a twist of extremely original and problematic visual and verbal languages. The essay Artaud dedicated to Van Gogh a year before his death without doubt establishes the apex of this intellectual parable. It is about a path, through Artaud’s both direct and indirect mediation, whose ramification reaches out to the most significant artistic experiences of the second half of the Twentieth Century, as shown in a triptych by Francis Bacon inspired to a recurring character in a poem by Eliot.