La dama
Date: 1998
Technique: Bronze, iron and silk
Dimensions: 260 x 100 x 125 cm aprox
Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma
Reg. no.: 446
Not on display
In La Dama, Bernardí Roig presents a freestanding sculptural volume in black and white, a recurrent colour binomial in the artist’s recent imaginary. Black is the naked torso of a body with female attributes, presenting the face completely covered in white silk; the pregnant figure holds a skull, towards which its gaze is directed, establishing a link between them. Part of a portrait with real measurements of his wife, pregnant with his first daughter, whose legless torso is supported on a bundle of circular metallic forms, like a repetitive stroke, in reference to the sketch of someone who draws compulsively in order to find a perfect shape.
The literary references it points out to us are inevitable. We fancy the image to be a reformulation of the Shakespearian monologue of the Danish Prince Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be’, placing us before desire and longing, fantasy and dream, the cycle of life and death.
P.R.
Bernardí Roig lives and works in Mallorca and is one of the most prolific and active Balearic artists, with an extensive international background. His artistic practice alludes to a society trapped in an era characterised by a lack of historical memory and identity. An individual in a world taken over by the mass media, which has lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction, between what really matters and that which is trivial. The drawing as a fundamental base of his creative process gives way to diverse media, such as sculpture, photography, the installation and the moving image through the cinematographic medium and video. He structures a visual language with a figurative nature, based on which he explores the individual and its obsessions and desires, constructs narratives that confront us with isolation or the passage of time, amongst other themes, and in which he includes references from literature, mythology, theatre, film and the visual arts. P.R.
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