Bernardí Roig

The exhibition Shadows Must Dance presents a selection of works made by Bernardí Roig (1965) in the last five years. These works are a continuation of the tissue of reflection that Bernardí Roig has developed about excess of light, blindness, the impossibility of looking, disagreement and invisibility and their metaphors. Aluminium, bronze or polyester resin sculptures, made from casts of people from his own circle, keep their eyes closed to a light that blinds them and returns them dizzyingly to their own solitariness, a solitariness sorely wounded by the storehouse of defeats into which their heads have been converted. Isolated figures, some frozen by a numbing cold and subjected to the pressure of their lack of identity; others suspended in space and enveloped in an all-covering metaphysical whiteness, leading us to accept the definitive bankruptcy of words; the certainty that no communication is possible. What would become of truth, Bataille wondered, if we were unable to see what exceeds our possibility of seeing? We come from a tradition that has constructed some of the fundamental figures of thought from light and illumination. In antiquity the ancients tore out their eyes in order to see, and blindness, plunging the subject into the most profound darkness, favoured the production of visions. These works speak to us of a shuttered gaze that shapes an extreme territory to which we have been dragged in the incorruptible undertaking of opening our eyes, and of which we have become captive in so far as we continue to be descendants of modernity. Blindness produces visions that the modern subject administers in order to see. In this visionary atmosphere covered over with uncertainties, apparitions and phantasmal doubles, Bernardí Roig draws a frontier territory between dream and reality, a place defined by the absence of guarantees with which convictions might be anchored. In addition to the narrative aim and the meticulous staging, in this series we see a fascination with the Baroque and its most theatrical tendency: “I am interested in the Baroque and its scenographic meaning. I am constantly accused of being excessive and obsessive because I understand the image as a condensation of uncommunicated experience, and that disorderly convulsion may possibly lead me to exaggeration. Those who defend dramatic restraint are outside my family of concerns. There is no call to fear excess, possibly the only way of getting closer to something, though there are still many now who prefer the mire of fossilised formalism. It is the interweaving of language with desire that converts the subject into a related event. I need that relation to construct and present these images.” The light that these pieces emit is not a light that illuminates them, but rather a light that prevents us from seeing them and that therefore only serves to continue constructing the depth of our blindness. Not as absence of seeing but as a possibility of representing that something that is extracted from the gaze so as to shape the inner gaze. In Roig’s work that inner gaze and its presentation with minimalist connotations is the bulwark of resistance to the hypervisibility that has now become the definitive way of exterminating the valiant act of looking. “I am interested in the theatrical space that Minimalism invents, in which sculpture forsakes the pedestal and is relocated among objects and redefined in terms of place. However, having learnt this, Minimalism ceases to interest me because it consumes the formalist model of modernity. It is idealistic, reductive and amnesic. And I am a descendant of Pompeii who accepts the visual heritage of Christianity, the idea of incarnation, and I cannot forget that the redness of a Cretan vase contains the memory of the last sunset. [Dan] Flavin uses fluorescence as material precisely in order to dematerialise space, and I use it as a metaphor to construct a narrative. There is an impulse of meaning in my work that is channelled through the figure, situating the figure in space and waiting for frictions to occur.”