This historic street art theatre company based in Strasbourg continues to reflect on the place of art in urban contexts, producing the next work in the triptych consisting of Blank Page (2009) and then Four Suns (2013). This new large format is a 9-metre high, 5-metre wide metal structure with a stage and three other storeys where painters can work on screen panels. This “moving polyptych” revisits an episode of Paul Gauguin’s life, when he painted on the shell of a turtle lost on a sandy beach in the Marquesas Islands. It is a spectacular and impressive piece of artistic choreography, blending text, painting, music and video.

It is a 9×5-metre, four-storey structure. The first storey hosts a narrator and musician, and the upper stories house artists perched behind the screen panels made of transparent, retractable plastic canvases on which they paint throughout the performance. Luc Amoros explains that “I like to think that, thanks to this species’ long life span, one of the painter’s works, far from the avarice of speculators, still continues to swim back and forth today in the ocean depths, in its own little mobile museum.”

The screen panels are painted by a choir of painters, who produce children’s drawings, morbid paintings, selfies, sacred images, advertisements and Fra Angelico and Gauguin copies. Beautiful paintings flit across the stage until all the canvases disappear. Gauguin’s Turtle fascinates with its use of light and shadow, brush techniques and acting, all carried out live and in full sight, creating a hypnotic and very physical display of beautiful visual illusions.