Bernardi Roig
Get up and walk! (Resurrection and halitosis)
After his recent opening at the Museum of Ludwigsburg, Germany, Bernardí Roig (Palma de Mallorca 1965) presents his second exhibition at Max Estrella Gallery in Madrid. Simultaneously, he is exhibiting at the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, an imposing space in which the idea of loneliness and the suffocation of a man hanging from a wall obsessively dominates. That ma’s eyes are on fire, a metaphor for an inordinate subjectivity; he bears witness to loss and fully assumes the cancellation of memory.
The exhibition “Get up and walk! (Resurrection and halitosis)” aims to reflect on the symbol of resurrection based on a drawing by Mantegna. It is a small drawing located at the British Museum that represents the “Cristo Morto” with the same foreshortening and position of the body as in the Brera Academy in Milan, but in this case he is arising. It is the image of a “quiet” resurrection, without levitations or ascents. “It represents a natural way to resurrect. It is the man who is incorporated into life and not the god who rises to heaven. It symbolizes the overwhelming return of the subject. ” (B.R.)
From that small drawing a whole narrative set is established, where through various supports (sculpture, drawing, photography or video) a single work is configured, generating an atmosphere of tension and strong psychological charge, with the idea of “Transition ”.
“It is the crushing darkness of black transiting towards the light that emanates from the face’s configuration. It is the transition from silence and contemplation to the deafening insult, from the most absolute stillness to the heartbeat of the night that is a flickering flame. ” (B.R.)
All these transitions take place under the watchful eye of the “Mourners”, who are the visual testimony of great pain.
In the cuattrocento painting, the figure of the “Mourner” was located to the left of the lying body. They were the guarantee that the event of death was mourned. In the exhibition, the “Mourners” have been arranged in the room on the right. There are six “black paintings” measuring 200x100cm, where the only figure that appears, from the depths of the night, is “a painful, disfigured head with a face marked by the traces of its own dissolution”
“On the other hand, in the biblical story, Lazarus is the only one who can reveal the truth, because he comes from death and for this reason he is sentenced to live as a resurrected one who has been deprived of speaking, of speaking about death. After three days being dead, the only guarantee that Lazaro offers us is halitosis, the stinky verb of the one that rots. That is why the only possibility of speech becomes insult and blasphemy.”
“Get up and walk! It is an order of great force. Direct, accurate and above all very ambitious: this is how the subject is constructed, a new subject who has come from death and whose sole responsibility will be to construct images.”
“Today we can say that the most courageous act is to resurrect. Whoever dares to resurrect will have sight guaranteed.”
“To resurrect is to come from the other side, that is why the one who resurrects is really the one who has the answers and that is possibly why, surely, he will be silenced.”
