Opening: Thursday, February 28th 2008 Duration of the exhibition: 28.02.2008-19.04.2008 at 8 pm Fernando Castro Flórez is going to hold the inaugural speech
The drawings, sculptures and Installations by Bernardí Roig (*1965 in Palma de Mallorca) deal with the existential questions of men: light and fire are metaphora for blindness, for the blazing mind which is caught in the individuals of our world full of low communication and intensity. 2006/07 a big solo show was shown at the Domus Art Museum DA2 Salamanca, at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, at the Kampa Museum Prague and the Musée d’Art Moderne Oostende. For 2010 a solo show at the IVAM in Valencia is planned.
Central figures of Bernardí Roigs’ show in Vienna are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Bernhard, two persons that have influenced the austrian, or even more the viennese artistic and cultural world unlike almost any other artist before. The model-sculpture of the Wittgenstein-house in the third district of Vienna is interpreted by Roig as the external appearance of Wittgensteins inner conflicts: so to say it can be seen as the architecture of his own mind. Remarkable details such as the curtains – which leave the persons inside the house in total isolation once closed – and the very spartanic interior design of the house Roig relates with the anxious mind of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Roig lets him wander through the house in the video placed inside the model. The drawings placed around the house show details of the house and the main figure of the show, marked by misery and impotence.
The austrian author Thomas Bernhard has influenced Bernardi Roig since his early youth. Bernhard incorporates the history around Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Wittgenstein house in Vienna in his novel „Correction“, which also serves as connecting link between Bernhard and Wittgenstein in the exhibition.
„Mein Kopf könnte ja dort sein, wohin ich gar keine Zugänge mehr habe“ – „my head could be somewhere I don’t have accession anymore“: the figures in Roigs’ works are accompanied by self-doubts and panic to the own failure. „Father-light exercises“, „Kiss-exercises“ or the frequently freezing and unfreezing head „Anton Frost“ are the documentation of the single attempts of Roigs’ figures to fight the own impotence in which they are trapped. The glistering light seems to blind them, and not to lighten the scenery. Furthermore it’s a metaphor for the blazing mind, trapped in them. (Mag. Ute Stadlbauer)
