Bernardi Roig

He currently lives and works between Madrid and Binissalem, Mallorca, Spain. A multi-media artist, Bernardí Roig left drawing to explore sculpture, photography, and video. Roig explores the portrayal of the body, using materials such as fire and its byproducts, ash, coal, and burnt wood. Bernardí Roig is obsessed with death and immortality with aesthetics and eroticism, and with the "idee fixe" that the thinking man must reclaim his forfeited ability to relate to one another on an intimate level. He realizes that to truly communicate, we need a dialogue of more than the spoken word. Roig speaks to the viewer through his solitary man; the human body and its symbols, reflecting on the meaning of life itself. He forces us to confront our desires: the human concepts of progress and social change, which remain unfulfilled. With these illusive, undefined objectives the artist invites a dialogue on the multiple identities of contemporary man, seen in the light of art and philosophy. Each individual work of art explores its own deep philosophical question but, in its entirety, can be approached as a sequence comprising one story, that of The Man of The Fire Eyes. The fire in Roig's sculpture burns deep within the mind of the subject. This man knows what he has lost and, still possessing the memory of culture and intellectual curiosity, clings to the hope its recovery. Our memories are often clouded with emotional baggage; each viewer brings his own experiences to these works and thus changes them forever. Roig's works of art are open to personal interpretation and non verbal communication; it is this, the artist's realm of unwritten poetry, which lingers in our mind's eye long after the works are out of view. For Roig, desire is the only thing that keeps death at arms length. It is this tangible proof that we are here, struggling to achieve higher consciousness, that defies the vacuum of meaning that exists in a large part of present day art.