Je l’ai déjà joué demain. Richard Peduzzi

16 × 24 cm 224 pages 30 color paintings and drawings softback september 2021 retail price: 25 €

Richard Peduzzi is a scenographer and painter. Since 1970 he has produced all the stage sets for Patrice Chéreau’s theatre and opera productions as well as a number of sets for Luc Bondy. He was director of the École des Arts Décoratifs (1990-2002), then the Villa Medici (2002-2008). He has produced a number of museum settings, notably at the Louvre Museum and the Orsay Museum. In 2017, he published Là-bas, c’est dehors with Actes Sud.

I ALREADY PLAYED YESTERDAY

Richard Peduzzi

In this very personal narrative, Richard Peduzzi recounts the decisive moments of his life and his upbringing in a family torn apart by the Second World War. His home life devastated, he gradually built an identity for himself in solitude on the margins of society. The burning desire to become a painter led him to Paris where he found himself in prestigious company, enjoying the city’s colorful nightlife. After his encounter with the French filmmaker and opera director Patrice Chéreau, Peduzzi went onto produce a whole host of opera and film sets for him, the highlights of his career. This period of his life provides a chance to look closer at this productive friendship built on great mutual understanding and complementary visions. These memoirs combine the personal and the collective enabling Peduzzi to look at the stream of fortunate coincidences that have peppered his professional life as well as the wounds he still bears from his tumultuous family background; somehow throughout stalks the shadow of death. The work is a testimony to his finely crafted, intuitive art and its salutary messages. “When you put so much strength and feeling into something, it becomes a fetish, a playground. When you are changing a theatrical space you want to transpose into it all the emotions, impulses and excesses of the heart you can muster. You want to astound. Reaching inside and expressing the world of your dreams and visions in space means pulling out all the stops.”