CONCEPT
JULY 1924
Pedro, a young Spanish-Dutch painter, lives with his parents and the Segovia family, who own a small wine company. After both families fail to pay off their debts to a loan shark, they are brutally butchered inside their home.
Pedro, who was out painting orchards when the massacre took place, finds his family and flees towards the North. On a train to Bobadilla he meets Béatrice Charron: a charming, yet deceitful young woman. Béatrice convinces Pedro to join her and her husband on their journey towards Paris, France. Charles Charron, Béatrice’s husband, is a rather unintelligent drunk, who is largely unaware of his wife’s flirtatious behaviour towards Pedro.
The threesome take a short break in the city of Toledo, famous for its medieval cathedral. Inside the cathedral, Pedro discovers a work by 16th century Mannerist painter El Greco, whose estranging work is often seen as an important precursor to modern art. Pedro has a spiritual epiphany as he approaches the painting inside the sacristy: the dynamic depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ seems to have a life of its own. This experience, Pedro’s first real encounter with abstraction, plants a seed inside his confused mind. From this moment on, Pedro is bound to gravitate towards the unknown, and unintentionally enters a world of unquenchable desire and both sexual and artistic transgression.
SEPTEMBER 1924
Pedro, Béatrice and Charles Charron have arrived in Paris, France. As Charles Charron goes out on nightly drinking binges, Pedro visits Béatrice and paints her as she sits naked on her luxurious couch. Béatrice attempts to seduce Pedro in a rather aggressive manner, but Pedro does not make love to her, for he is frightened by her behaviour. He goes back to his Montmartre hotel room to be alone.
In Paris, Pedro meets Claire Sophie Petit, whom he lovingly calls Chauchat. She is a beautiful, innocent Wallonian poet, who resides in the same hotel. Pedro almost instantly falls in love with her and banishes Béatrice Charron from his mind.
Chauchat introduces Pedro to Piet Mondriaan, who lives in the city. The artists visit L’Effort moderne, the famous art gallery, owned by Léonce Rosenberg. Pedro also manages to get his hands on several copies of De Stijl and a manifest by Kazimir Malevich; the founder of Suprematism, a Russian abstract art movement.
Pedro reads the literature that has been given to him with a tremendous fury. He is particularly obsessed with Malevich’s Black Square, which is often described as the absolute zero point of painting. The painting, depicting a black square on a white background, is a gaping abyss. To Pedro, it is a creative void; a portal to the unknown regions of the subconscious mind. As he draws back into his hotel room, he fantasizes about Chauchat, whose quiet, mysterious ways allow him to form an image of immaterial perfection in his mind, where art and life intertwine and are gradually distorted by abstraction.
OCTOBER 1924
Pedro arrives in Utrecht and stays at a hotel. Chauchat, his obsession and muse, has returned to her husband, Jan. One evening, she invites him to De reikende hand, a café frequented by a local Modernist art collective. Pedro goes there and meets artists of various disciplines. They discuss the third manifesto by De Stijl. Pedro, now fully devoted to Modernism and driven by a desire to leave an indelible mark on the art world, defends its radical contents and argues that all art should distance itself from physical reality and Naturalism; it should only serve as a gateway to the spiritual dimension.
Jan, an art critic and one of the founders of the Utrecht collective, finds Pedro’s idealism frustrating and juvenile. He tells Pedro that radical viewpoints only lead to disaster: similar radicalism led many Futurists to fight and die in the Great War or to abandon their ideology in favour of rationality.
After leaving the café, Pedro wanders through the dimly lit streets of Utrecht. He walks along the foggy canals and witnesses the murder of a homeless man. The sight of the blood pouring from the dying man’s skull deeply inspires him; transgression fuels his artistic visions and he writes down a quote by Marinetti: ‘We must shake the gates of life to test the hinges and locks.’
That same night, he is visited by Chauchat, appearing to him as an aromatic mist. They make love in the dark. Pedro falls asleep and has a vision: he sees the Black Square within a hellish abyss. It is lifted from the depths with ropes and hands without arms, bodies without faces.
DECEMBER 1924
Obsessions grow stronger. Pedro starts guiding the Utrecht art collective towards total abstraction. He co-directs a Dada performance with sound poetry, inspired by the work of Hugo Ball. Frustrated by criticism from a mostly oblivious audience, he sets the theatre on fire in an act of arson. He is briefly imprisoned and spends most of his time hallucinating and dreaming of Chauchat. Shortly before his release, Pedro realizes art should not be limited by a stage or canvas. Spiritual art should have an omnipresent character; it needs to be brought into the world in order to devour it.
Once back on the streets, Pedro starts working towards a climactic event. He assigns various bizarre tasks to his fellow collective members, such as working on giant Suprematist set pieces, observing minute changes in the atmospheric quality of the Dom Tower, writing subliminal poetry and participating in Khlyst-like rites of ecstasy. All of this should, according to Pedro, lead to a performance at the Utrecht city theatre at the end of the month.
As set pieces are finished, poems are written and various crimes committed, collective members are unable to find Pedro. He has resigned himself to a small dark room, a spatial black square, where he speaks to Chauchat in the dark. He worships her and recognizes she is the essence of the abstraction he longs for: though she is intangible and fleeting, she is limitless and ever present.
When Chauchat actually visits Pedro one day, he is unable to recognize her. He speaks in tongues, painting on his body and the walls, frightening her. Chauchat leaves, returns to Jan and decides to never speak to Pedro again.
On the night of the performance, Pedro is nowhere to be seen. An eager audience gathers in the theatre, anticipating a spectacle. From the wings, the artists agree they will not perform without Pedro’s direction.
Only a few hundred meters away, Pedro visits Chauchat, murders both her and Jan, takes Chauchat’s body back to his blackened room and commits suicide.
Meanwhile inside the theatre, the manager grows impatient. The crowd has grown even larger and people have started shouting at the motionless red curtains. After much arguing, they are drawn, revealing nothing but a vast, empty void.