The Four Seasons Restaurant

Romeo Castellucci focuses on the story of painter Mark Rothko's removal of his paintings from the walls of the New York restaurant that had commissioned them. Behind this real-life event in 1958, he examines the torment of man in the face of images and their use, as well as the social rejection of which the artist was the promoter. Alluding to the painter's desire to erase the image - he found it impossible to exhibit his canvases in a place like the Four Seasons Restaurant, given its wealthy but terribly superficial clientele - Romeo Castellucci aims to probe "the relationship between representation and the negation of appearance that, since Greek tragedy, has underpinned all Western man's relationship to the image". Indeed, Mark Rothko always considered Greek tragedy to be the foundation of his painting. JFP