calendario eventi  :: 

X

17/9/2009

Bernardi' Roig and Matthew Carver

Caprice Horn Gallery, Berlin

A quick cursory glance might suggest two very different artists, but in principle both artists are interested in the concept of time and space, fractures and reconstruction. Both use their medium, process and subject matter so that their work engages in the dialogic nature of art, extending from arts rich past to its slippery, shifting present. For Carver the use of light offers clues to the heterglot discourse in painting. Roig uses light in a metaphorical sense, less so as a source of illumination, rather more as dazzlement and even the blindness of confusion. Roig casts his gaze inwards while Carver's vision of the exterior world, fractures. Ultimately for both, the exterior extends all the way out and back into the quiet interior. It is part of the rich back and forth dialogue of art.

“… he saw nothing and far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culmination of his sight. Useless for seeing, his eye took on extraordinary proportions, developed beyond measure…” Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure.

In Pilar Ribal’s wonderful essay on Roig’s work, he quotes Marc Auge “the world of supermodernity does not exactly match the one in which we believe we live, for we live in a world that we have not yet learned to look at”. It may well be the by product of that “overabundance of events in the present” that has resulted in a displacement of space-time parameters as well as the “radical subversion of prevailing modes of historical interpretation”. To quote Pilar Ribal, “that could be due to the fact that what is presented to our eyes is a global and parodic image, an echo of echoes a copy of thousands of copies, an infinite simulacrum that has turned reality into an inextricable maze of ‘non-places’ where metaphoric language and mimesis no longer have a place”. Temporal conception has been overstepped but so has the individual, the self, forced to accept a diffuse, accelerated and correlative collective identity. Marc Auge concludes “the individual production of meaning is thus more necessary than ever”.

Roig with his superb acquaintance of arts history and philosophical discourse, has long thought about whether it is possible to convey meaning in his work, leading him ultimately to burn all his paintings (reminiscent of the symbolic annihilation performed by Malevich). Subsequently Roig focuses all his images on the blackness of charcoal. He realizes his sketches are still the “only way of articulating, if you will, the magma of your obsessions” Roig. He uses charcoal and ash as well as substances of his own body, semen, blood, saliva. Roig understands that that the only possible images are in his mind, his body. He proceeds to portray himself and others as naked and dead, grotesque almost wicked but always with evidence of transcension. It is as if there is an appropriation of the negative by a positive. Roig captures the proximity of extremes. He instills in his work that existential and tragic element of the absurd. His ridicule and mistreatment almost, of his characters insinuates a bankruptcy of ideologies. The flame that burns the faces, the eyes of Roig’s sculptures thereby unable to see or speak, are imprisoned and punished, driving home the notion of displacement of meaning. He rebels against the iconoclast dogmatism of contemporaneity. Light for Roig is a metaphor for blindness and lack of communication, isolation or ‘blindness’: you need to shut your eyes twice, to be able to see. Inner sight, a reconfiguration of meaning is required. The iconic banality of contemporaneity needs to be overcome.

Bernardí Roig’s work can be seen at the Venice Biennale (in collaboration with the IVAM- solo show at IVAM in Nov.). Collections include Foundation AENA, Madrid, Museum Jacopo Borges, Caracas, Museum Sofia Imber, Caracas, MADC Museum of Contemporary Art, San José, Collection Gille, Brussels, Saikade Museum of Art, Kagawa, Contemporary art Collection, La Caixa, Barcelona Council of Culture amongst others.

Matthew Carver’s large, fractured cityscape paintings have recently garnered attention from collectors and critics alike. His anamorphic worlds reveal themselves in everyday garbage cans or ice cream scoops or car mirrors. In one particular installation, an animated almost holographic and angst ridden figure is found in a suspended fire extinguisher which rotates at high speed blurring or fracturing the reflected image of the figure. In another installation, the observer is invited to place his head inside a lit up box, thereby entering a virtual, busy almost 3D intersection in the Ginza area of Tokyo.

Imagery in Carver’s painting has been described by Gina Fairley as “morphed and sutured with a DJs sampling and the result has the pulse of now rather than where”. She elaborates, “It is a constructed scape not so dissimilar to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner with its crusty edges of crumbing capitalism and underbelly of anarchy, one that has a curious currency as we face today’s global economic crisis, a shattering if you like, of the world we know. Whilst an abstraction, Carver’s ocular judo is in synch with the fraying of this collective contemporary landscape.”

When looking at Carver’s work one is struck by the “speed”, one can literally hear the noise. Speed has the ability to seduce and excite. It is a multilayered both literal and philosophical concept. As Paul Virilo puts it “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world … We are no longer concerned with real space.” Carver’s works immerse the viewer in this “unreal” spatial vortex. Art is caught in the “no time” and “no place” of “now”.

Carver is the recipient of numerous awards including the Canadian Emerging Artist Prize. His work is in numerous public collections.

Image: Bernardí Roig

Vernissage: Friday, 18/9/2009, 6–9pm

Caprice Horn Gallery
Kochstr. 60 - Berlin
Opening hours: Tue.-Sat. 11am-6pm
free admission

stampa

permanent link