INAUGURACIÓN BERNARDÍ ROIG EN MÁLAGA – 19 OCTOBER 2022
BERNARDÍ ROIG
El último rostro y la afonía del Minotauro.
October 19, 2022 – May 30, 2023
Bernardí Roig is exhibiting in Málaga for the first time with El último rostro y la afonía del Minotauro, three simultaneous exhibitions at the Museo Casa Natal Picasso, the Centre Pompidou Málaga, and the Russian Museum Collection. This exhibition is included in the international programme of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1973–2023).
At the Museo Casa Natal Picasso, the project Entre el espejo y la máscara will be presented. It is structured around an interpretation of what is considered Picasso’s last self-portrait, dated 30 June 1972. It shows a frontal head occupying the entire surface of the paper, whose gaze is so intense that the eyes no longer fit within the face. It is a gaze that already contains death.
Just two days later, he made another very similar drawing, Figura, in black and white, in which Picasso has torn away part of his skull, emptied his gaze, leaving the eye sockets exposed, lost his lips, and revealed a stripped set of teeth. Picasso removes his final mask: he is no longer either the Harlequin or the Minotaur.
Obsessed with these two drawings, the artist created in 2017 the series P.R.P. (The Last Portrait), the embryo of the entire project. Five drawings that trace the journey of an image—the last self-portrait of Picasso—that becomes dehumanised through metamorphosis. In the exhibition space of the Museo Casa Natal Picasso, a succession of images twists into a monologue aiming to capture the remaining frontal presence of a face and its voids, whose identity escapes through one of its openings.
The Centre Pompidou Málaga will host El laberinto de luz y la cabeza del Minotauro, an exact replica of the Bou de Costitx, a key example of Balearic Talayotic culture dated between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. The endless dialogue with the emptiness of the place and its amnesia, inside that womb of light that is the Centre Pompidou’s Cube, creates the labyrinth where the Minotaur will be trapped, born of Pasiphae’s uncontrollable passion, condemned to endlessly desire the beautiful white bull until being impregnated by it.
Picasso remained, for half of his creative life, hidden behind the mask of the Minotaur to conceal his duality. A cycle of life, violence, death, and resurrection that is renewed with the tension of each stroke on a sheet of paper, conjuring our tragic destiny.
At the Russian Museum Collection, Shadow dancers can be seen, an installation composed of four small chrome-bronze ballerinas suspended from the ceiling, occupying one of the rooms of the current exhibition Incesante Picasso. Obra y vida.
This installation, embedded within the heart of the exhibition, explores Degas’s major influence on Picasso’s work, especially the figure of the dancer and his collaboration with the Ballets Russes. These small figures, with some of their legs unfinished, rotate continuously in space and cast overlapping shadows of their own silent slowness, without music.
Opposite this silent dance, a large drawing, Cap Negre (2021), attempts to introduce time into the image without the image itself moving. The large canvas frame conceals an audio device with a recording of a wall clock. Insistent, precise, and a guarantor of our end.
