Edgar Honetschläger: Los Feliz
A road movie shot in a studio by Edgar Honetschläger.
Three Cardinals hire the devil in order to prevent the West from losing its supremacy over the world using the ace up their sleeve: Images of America. In a Mercedes-Benz from the fifties the British devil, a young French museum guard and a Japanese Shinto goddess drive from Rome to Los Angeles through a painted and drawn, two dimensional America. FAME is what the young girl seeks. LOVE is what the lady from the Far EAST cannot feel. Depth is what we DESIRE. 3D is what we GET. The United States of IMAGES.
In September the 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 (13×51 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.
