Bernardi Roig
Deshollinar los muros (721 dibujos al raso)
This new exhibition by Bernardí Roig (Palma, 1965) at Max Estrella is an attemp to relief the excess of soot in the walls, overcrowded with images with nothing to see. But not only those images are tired, the eye is worn out, and the walls exhausted. Even light doesn't shine from above, now it's at ground level, and its not affirmative anymore.
'Deshollinar los muros (Sweeping the walls)' is, among other things, an exhibition of drawings on the floor. Walls, once being swept, can only be used to be scratched or penetrated. The gallery becomes an empty whiteness saturated space that speaks about the iris fatigue and the visual sclerosis. This is caused by transparency of the shadowless technological present. This is amnesic temporality is crushed by the excess of reality. Walls are more beautiful when there’s nothing on them, just white on white.
721 unsheltered drawings, rushed, drawn with black ink, some with color splashes that defy inflation of what is impossible to represent. These drawings are created on the go, without any corrections or tweaks. Pictures of generous bodies, joyous and exultant of carnality, are found piled up in the corners of the room. Some drawings build up the ‘mountain of rejects’, others are part of the ‘area of accepted’, but they could be easily interchanged. All of them are full of time. Sketching is the only tool one can trust, as it surrounds a moment in time, an instant. That is, an idea on the run.
This series talks about excess that overwhelms the eye. It forms a conglomerate of liquid coagulated mass of unedited lines that disseminate in space. These drawings lack a gaze that supports them. All but one, anyone, exhibited to be replaced 720 times. The latter is framed, hanged, lighted and validated. It’s also jailed by a voluptuous frame that’s placed at the eye’s height. This is the carrier of a psychic echo of the uncanny. That is due to images’ nature to show what they are incapable to represent. The frame causes the wall’s conclusion and throws our gaze into the unreal territory of the image. The frame serves to isolate and anchor whilst in this massive visual mediocrity cordillera.
This is an exhibition of a single drawing that is 721 times different. It is not alone. It shares space with a TV monitor, a spinning head and a figure walking on the ceiling.
A TV is a black box always full of captive pictures waiting to be poured. De-visager, 2022 , contains those images and in less than thirty seconds of eternal loop – homage to Bergman -, shows a close up of a genderless elderly person ripping its mask off only to show the same face over and over again. This is an infected time loop where what is hidden is exactly the same as what is shown. The same is the same as the same.
Autorretrato con la nariz pulida, 2021 (which translates as Self portrait with polished nose) is an aluminum head casted after the artist’s head that slowly spins. This sculpture works as a mirror where to see our own face inserted in time. Our head is a spinning dump and each turn is a time’s strike that certifies our exhaustion. This is until the last spin.
Autorretrato caminando por el techo, 2022 (self portrait walking in the ceiling), a real life size aluminum sculpture that hangs upside down dominates the space in the gallery’s back room. It’s the ghostly doppelgänger of the observer, weightless and uneasy, messing up with guaranties of space. This is an appearance that delays in time.
The many layers and formalizations of this project question us, with its broken figurative language, about our incestuous relationship with memory, obsessions, weirdness and deep repressed concerns related to inherited images. These are many times unfinished images about persistent solitude. They form a cluster of overlapping timelines.
In recent years, Bernardí Roig has shown his work in multiple national and international institutions, including BOZAR , Bruxelles, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Alte Pinakoteke, München, 54ª Biennale di Venezia, Instituto Veneto di Science, Ca Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, and Palazzo Fortuny, Venezia The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., Triennale di Milano, Milano, Museo Carlo Billotti-Villa Borghese, Roma, Science Museum, London, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miro and Museu Es Baluard, , Palma, CAC, Málaga, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, or Fundacion Telefónica, CA2 Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Sala Alcalá31 and Tabacalera in Madrid
Until the 30th of May Bernardí Roig’s works will be shown in El último retrato y la afonía del Minotauro a triple simoultaneos exhibition in Centre Pompidou Málaga, Museo Casa Natal Picasso and Colección Museo Ruso in Málaga.
