Roi Soleil

Albert Serra cultivated an art at home in cinemas as much as in exhibition venues, blurring the boundaries between these rather different spaces. If never as thoroughly as with ROI SOLEIL, which intertwines installation and performance art in the creation of a minimalist beast best described as the brutally ironic, red-neon-cool art scene-double of Serra’s warmest and maybe most heart-felt film so far, LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV (2016). The images and sounds for ROI SOLEIL were recorded in early 2017 at the Galeria Graça Brandão (Lisbon) where Lluís Serrat (in just-about every possible sense the opposite of LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV’s Jean-Pierre Léaud) performed the monarch’s agony for seven days in front of the space’s visitors, using merely a few props, most importantly: a massive wig and a tacky, multi-tired cake stand. Some 29 hours of material showing Serrat shuffing around, lying down, moaning, writhing, then finally keeping dead still were condensed by Serra into a 61-minute tight piece that from mid-August on was screened for a month twice an evening at the Galeria Cadaqués (Girona) as a video-installation in cinema-like circumstances. And now, it has arrived where it always belonged: cinema! – Olaf Möller, Viennale

Winner of the Grand Prix of the 2018 FID Marseille International Competition, the film captures an hour-long staging of the slow agony leading up to French monarch Louis XIV’s death.
"Roi Soleil" follows on the heels of Serra’s 2016 "The Death of Louis XIV", isolating, extending and recasting its titular death scene in a completely different context. By translating this performative  installation back into a cinematic setting, Serra offers us an intensely immersive experience entangled in different times, sites and media. – Tate Modern

Aristocracy in all its grandeur, its stupidity and its agony, the representation of power, the forces of art. Between the sublime and the grotesque, between derision and the derisive, between Buñuel and Dali, a royal figure engages in a quest for his death mask. – FID Marseille