Entering Bernardí Roig’s workshop one is greeted by a series of disturbing, stark-white sculptures, created by the artist to induce a sense of catharsis similar to that experienced by ancient spectators of Greek tragedies.
The artist’s use of fluorescent light is a reference to 1960s minimalism, the idea of simplifying down to the essential. It is also used to emphasize the feelings of pain represented in the statues. The sculpted figures before us are all shying away from their respective light sources, referring to the well-known Plato’s Cave allegory in which through our unreliable senses we are only able to see shadows and truth is inaccessible to us; only the philosopher, armed with reason, is capable of acquiring knowledge and truth in the world. The artist’s collective work is a hotbed of myth, metaphor, depth and humanity.
Roig is mainly a figurative contemporary artist, but a healthy conceptual dimension also exists in his work. He is interested in exploring humanity through a variety of media at his disposal: sculpture, video, illustration or photography. His drawings in particular, some abstract, others more concrete, are exceptional in their intensity and depth. They can be found lying around the floor of the workshop and hanging on the walls, illustration being in fact the artist’s preferred medium for the immediate capture of his thoughts and reflections.
Also of note here is a wall covered in photographs, news clippings and souvenirs, which I was lucky enough to have seen earlier this year at the wonderful exhibition in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid, aptly titled “El coleccionista de obsesiones" (“The Obsession Collector”). The artist himself referred to the exhibition as his personal monolog.
Ending my visit to the workshop, I discovered Roig’s refined taste in design as I laid back on Charles and Ray Eames’ famous Lounge Chair (1956), basking under the light from Jean Prouvé’s adjustable wall lamp Potence (1950).
