Royal Palace of Caserta, Court Theatre is transformed with Per Barclay's Abyss

From May 21 to July 2025, the Reggia di Caserta welcomes the exhibition Abisso, a site-specific project by Per Barclay curated by Marina Guida. Set up in the museum’s Court Theater, the project aims to offer the public a visual and symbolic experience, capable of reinterpreting the historical imagery of the place and transporting visitors to a dimension suspended between attraction and disquiet.

Organized in collaboration with the Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin, the exhibition was selected by the Scientific Committee of the Royal Palace of Caserta through the call for participatory enhancement related to the first half of 2025. The call is a tool for sharing, experimenting, creating and innovating cultural content. Research institutes, universities, training centers, cultural operators, cooperatives, foundations, voluntary and social promotion associations, groupings of associations and other nonprofit entities have the opportunity to submit proposals that include activities of cultural fruition and physical or virtual enhancement of heritage, moments of aggregation, use of artistic and creative expressions inside the Royal Palace, in the Park or at the Aqueduct Carolino.

Barclay transforms the Palace’s 18th-century Theater into a reflective abyss by covering the floor with a black oil-like fluid. This smooth and reflective yet obscuring surface radically alters the perception of the environment, projecting the audience into a universe of enigmatic reflections. The work intends to explore current issues related to the extractive industry and theenvironmental impact of oil, interpreted symbolically as a metaphor for the subconscious, mystery and inner darkness, in a game of cross-references between reality and representation.

Through Abyss, Barclay aims to investigate the dual nature of oil - a fundamental yet destructive resource - that has profoundly influenced human history, generating wealth and destruction, progress and environmental crises. Black gold, taken from the depths of the Earth, has invaded every sphere of our existence, marking the course of wars and irreversibly altering the natural and social landscape.

Those who visit the installation find themselves in front of their own reflection, emerging from a surface that does not merely send back the image of the observer, but suggests the existence of a hidden, estranging and perturbing world. In this surface that simulates the idea of an abyss, the artist seems to want to evoke the hidden truth, the attraction inherent in the vertigo of deep knowledge. In the eerie, perfect reflection of the liquid, the visitor is mirrored and lost, captured by a sense of vertigo. The theater, traditionally a place of staging, becomes the stage for a drama without characters, dominated by an enigmatic and totalizing matter, which encompasses everything and denies all escape.

“The call for participatory enhancement,” said Tiziana Maffei, director of the Reggia di Caserta, “has opened new possibilities for collaboration and made ambitious projects concrete, capable of enriching the cultural production of our museum. Per Barclay’s site-specific installation, with its hypnotic interplay of reflections and perspectives, will ignite new suggestions in the rarefied atmosphere of the Court Theater, a place of wonder and contemplation, today unfortunately not yet usable for public performance activities. While waiting to complete the intervention that will restore full functionality to this extraordinary space, Barclay will crystallize, in a visionary key, its beauty, projecting it through time also through the artistic language of photography.”

“The sumptuous architecture of the Reggia Theater, an emblem of power and prestige, is transfigured by the glossy black fluid. Ornamental details and decorative splendor are lost and re-emerge under new angles, as if in a dreamlike, disorienting vision,” the curator explains. “Barclay induces a critical reflection on appearance and the ephemeral, transforming space into a threshold between the real and the unreal. In this context, oil not only alters physical perception, but also engages the viewer in an ambivalent experience, in which beauty and disquiet merge: now it is the viewer himself who is on stage.”

The site-specific project Abyss - For Barclay at the Reggia di Caserta enjoys the moral patronage of the Municipality of Caserta, the Campania Region and the Norwegian Embassy.

The exhibition is included in the ordinary cost of admission/subscription to the Museum.
Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. (last admission 6:30 p.m.); Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (last admission 12:30 p.m.). Closed Tuesdays and on free days.

Royal Palace of Caserta, Court Theatre is transformed with Per Barclay's Abyss

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