Bernardí Roig – EXCESS

With “EXCESS”, the Center for International Light Art Unna is showing until April 2019 an exhibition with one of the currently most important representatives of Spanish contemporary art.

Image above: Bernardí Roig: An Illuminated head for Blinky P. (The gun), 2010 | Der Italiener (The cow), 2011 © Bernhard Rot

From 24.11.2018 to 14.04.2019, large-format light installations by sculptor and multimedia artist Bernardí Roig (*1965, Mallorca) will be shown, which open up a critical perspective on people in conflict with their – mostly media – influences. In Roig’s oeuvre, human sculptures made of polyester resin in combination with fluorescent tubes are characteristic of this motif and also form the focus of the exhibition.

Male synthetic resin bodies lean against walls and doors, flooded and simultaneously imprisoned by bright neon light. Elsewhere, an otherwise completely isolated figure drags light in the form of heavy bundles of fluorescent tubes behind it. Another one threatens to be almost killed by similarly glistening tubes. The protagonists are all in conflict with the light, but what kind of light is this? The light in Roig’s scenarios is not light that creates clarity. Rather, it is a light that dazzles rather than illuminates, that isolates rather than connects.

Roig says: “Today we live in an atmosphere filled with images, but the experience they produce has a low intensity. It is even more difficult today to give meaning to a picture. We are subject to light, a light that dissolves the boundaries of things, a white line between which everything moves.” The cold neon light is reminiscent of the light-based image flood of the digital revolution. Roig is about social and individual identity loss. Loneliness, perhaps as a consequence of a lack of direct communication. People can be seen, marked by the burden of light. Light is shown here as a burden, as an overuse of human senses, as the shadow side of an oversupply.

Roig’s works have been exhibited internationally at numerous venues, including the 54th Venice Biennale, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. His works can be found in public and private collections worldwide.

Now his intensive and contemporary installations can be seen at the Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst Unna. Six large sculptures will be shown in the main exhibition rooms, further works will be positioned in unexpected places in the museum. In addition, the artist is developing a site-specific work especially for the premises in Unna.

WHEN?

Saturday, November 24th, 2018 to Thursday, April 14th, 2019

WHERE?

Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst
Lindenplatz 1
59423 Unna

www.lichtkunst-unna.de