In The Final Act, Raúl Pizarro undertakes a visual journey that culminates in Bracciano as the epilogue of seven years of artistic inquiry that began with Oximorón: Pagan practices of sanctification (GAM, 2022). This photographic series —a performative record of the Calvary— transcends documentary to become a critical mirror of our era. Inspired by Caravaggio’s theatrical rawness and Pasolini’s social satire, Pizarro fuses the sacred and the profane, exposing the paradox of a world in which ritual is consumed as spectacle.
The images, captured in black and white —a nod to Baroque chiaroscuro and neorealist cinema— reveal luxury crosses and corporate masks replacing faces, evoking Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Here, the pilgrims are us: accomplices and victims of a system that commodifies suffering under the slogan I’m lovin’ it. The snake and the monkey—dualist symbols within the work—no longer confront each other; they collaborate, revealing the hypocrisy of a society that normalizes contradiction. As in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew, or Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, Pizarro interrogates the viewer’s complicity. Are we witnesses or executioners? The residency in Bracciano —near Rome, the city that saw Giordano Bruno burned— becomes the perfect stage for this “lowering of the curtain.” A closure that is not resignation, but a call to metanoia: the transformation born from recognizing the Beast—empty devotion to consumption—and redeeming it with the same light that illuminated art’s martyrs.