The Pinault Collection is participating in the Nuit Blanche together with the Church of Saint-Eustache

For the 2023 Nuit Blanche, at the invitation of Father Yves Trocheris, parish priest of the Church of Saint-Eustache, the Pinault Collection will present a work by Lucas Arruda titled Neutral Corner (2018) in the church’s Chapel of Sainte-Madeleine.

This work will be shared with both the faithful and visitors to the church for almost three weeks, from 2 to 18 June 2023. This is the only video ever made by this Brazilian artist, whose paintings are currently being featured in the exhibition ”Avant l’orage“ at the Bourse de Commerce. Lucas Arruda completed this piece during his Pinault Collection artist’s residency in Lens. The Pinault Collection is presenting this piece to the public for the first time ever.
Powerful, haunting, and obsessive, the video consists of black and white images of a middleweight boxing championship fight held on 24 March 1962 at Madison Square Garden. This match pitted two famous boxers against one another: the American Emile Griffith and the Cuban Benny “Kid” Paret, with Paret succumbing to Griffith’s blows and collapsing. The blows that Paret endured in the ring sent him into a coma from which he would never emerge, as he died ten days later in the hospital. The heavy mediatisation of his death led to a change in boxing rules.
Lucas Arruda used the film recording of this fight, which he re-edited to cut, crop, and scramble the sequence of images to yield an entirely different outcome to the event. Some scenes are missing, including Paret’s falling under the rain of Griffith’s blows, while others were slowed down. 

The video begins in silence, with the referee, the boxers, and their respective staff standing in the ring, all looking in the same direction, probably listening to the national anthem. Then, the boxers’ bodies begin rebounding from the top to the bottom of the frame. A funereal piece of music, Strokur (2014), by Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, begins to make itself heard.
Some of the more graphic, abstract shots – of the ropes around the ring vibrating as the bodies bounced off them – recall the horizons that often populate Arruda’s paintings like thresholds. Hanging from these same ropes, his arms outstretched in a cross shape, Paret would cross the final threshold from life to death. The film then focuses on the boxers’ faces and the upper parts of their bodies. The cello playing becomes more insistent, a harbinger of the impending tragedy. Viewers are spared the flurry of fatal uppercuts. The artist trains our eyes on the defeated boxer’s slump, which the announcer termed “exhaustion, pure and simple”. The edit repeats the collapse several times, focusing on the hands and arms that sought to free Paret’s body from the ropes and stretch his body out on the floor of the ring, a scene highly reminiscent of representations in Western painting of Christ’s deposition from the cross. 

Practical information

Lucas Arruda, Neutral Corner, 2018
Chapelle Sainte-Madeleine, Church of Saint-Eustache
2, impasse Saint-Eustache - 75001 Paris
From 2 to 18 June 2023
Nuit Blanche – Saturday, 3 June
The church will exceptionally remain open until 1:00 a.m. 

As part of the Nuit Blanche, the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection and the Church of Saint-Eustache are providing a joint visit from 7:00 p.m. until midnight in the company of the museum’s docents.
The museum and the exhibition “Avant l’orage”  will remain open until midnight for the occasion. Admission is free, and online reservations at  pinaultcollection.com are recommended.

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