Lucas Arruda

Untitled "Neutral Corner"

Untitled “Neutral Corner” by Lucas Arruda is a short video that recomposes the black and white imagery of a middleweight boxing championship fight at Madison Square Garden in 1962. The match pitted two famous boxers, the American Emile Griffith against the Cuban Benny “Kid” Paret, who sustained injuries during the fight that left him in a coma from which he died ten days later in hospital. Arruda takes the original footage of the fight as his source material, but edits the imagery, and blurs the order of the sequence through framing and cutting. Music with funereal tones, Strokur (2014), by Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir plays throughout, pre-empting Paret’s violent fate. Offering an alternative unfolding of events, some key scenes are intentionally omitted, like Paret falling under his opponent’s blows, while other actions are slowed down. Instead of depicting the volley of uppercuts that lead to Paret’s coma, the artist cuts directly to the fall of the vanquished boxer. The montage repeats this collapse several times, only to focus on the hands and arms that seek to detach Paret’s body from the ring ropes and lay him on the floor. The more abstract imagery in the film, such as the ropes stretched at the edge of the ring, recall the horizons which repeatedly populate Arruda’s landscape paintings. The imagery of Paret collapsing is also reminiscent of the affected figures in biblical paintings, so it is fitting that this work was first exhibited in an exhibition at the Church of Saint Eustache in Paris, as it draws a parallel between the two genres.