DESALOJAR EL ROSTRO
Galeria Miguel Marcos presents Desalojar el rostro, an exhibition by Bernardí Roig showcasing a selection of his recent works—sculptures, paintings, drawings, and an audiovisual piece. These pieces draw the viewer’s gaze into the absorbing depths of black, ensnaring the eyes in the electric jolt of fluorescent light.
The common root of these images is the experience of the body. The works are expanded drawings that convey a drive reflecting on painting as defeat and on the need to interpret the representation of the body’s transience in order to situate it within a spatial dramaturgy. They constitute the synthesis of a multifaceted universe, a baroqueness of elaborate metaphors which, through an exaggerated narrative, reveals a range of obsessions and fixations that confront the individual’s inability to communicate in the face of a destiny doomed to extinction.
Desalojar el rostro is about liberating it from the tyranny of time and its furrows, a way of expressing the emptying of features and accumulated attributes in a face to produce a negotiated identity and, in doing so, confront our own bundle of shadows.
Bernardí Roig’s work, embracing the contradictions inherited from minimalism, uses space as raw material in which to place the figure—a figure that aligns with its hidden truth and, pierced by an excess of light, speaks to us of a memory that has calcified over time, erasing the trembling edges of its representation.
A life-size aluminum figure, Homo Lux (2025), dominates the entrance space of the gallery. It is a sculpture that emerges from a mold—the place where a body once existed, a ghostly, figural, transient, and uncertain presence. The image depicts a half-naked, pitiable man, a kind of monastic golem, meditative and victimized, loaded with resonances and allusions to a forsaken masculinity. His trousers are unfastened, a metaphor for his excess of reality, for he no longer fits even in his own shroud. His face is covered by a mesh mask, and he is pierced by fluorescent light, generating a sense of instability and visual lightness.
Three large paintings on black velvet, Pinturas Negras (2025), absorb the light of the space. They are images of bodies drawn with delicate, trembling white lines that fracture the density of black, allowing light to seep through. They function like cracks in our darkness, like slashes in the ultimate night. These are de-figurative paintings that act as mirrors, reflecting a body that fades, our own.
Opposite the Pinturas Negras, a series of panel paintings, Black-Father White (2018–2025), portraits of light that seek to capture the likeness in the face of the artist’s father. They could be considered acheiropoietic images, non manufactum images, not made by human hands, like the Veronica or the Shroud of Turin. They are like a breath that coagulates flashes of light adhering to the surface of the representation in an extreme degree of fragility. They could be understood as revealed images, apparitions rather than presences, even if they are not.
Homo Aluminium Black (2025) and the drawings from the Aristocrazia Nera series (2015) compel us to lower our gaze to about a meter from the floor. In that room, the viewpoint aligns with the eyes of a 90 cm aluminum figure, which has stepped with its left foot into the puddle of black paint spilling from the first step of David Tremlett’s walldrawing (2016), a pyramid of angled forms that dominates the gallery’s second space. Homo Aluminium Black is a wretched figure that no longer wishes to see or hear, and from covering its ears and closing its eyes so much, it has disfigured its face, from which the features that once guaranteed its identity have vanished.
The drawings from the Aristocrazia Nera series are a free-fall interpretation of J.D.A. Ingres’ family portraits, revealing the drive of dissatisfaction that pulses beneath a scene of happiness. Strangeness and unease throb in the repressed depths of the bourgeois interior of well-being, everything that should have remained hidden and secret, yet has come to light.
De-visager (2022) is thirty seconds of an endless continuous session —in debt to Bergman—: the close-up of an old, genderless head tearing off the mask of its own face to reveal, again and again, that same face. An infected temporal circularity where what is revealed is precisely the same as what is hidden. A relentless, insistent image that lays bare the entire territory seized from resemblance. The same is the same as the same…
B.R.
