Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea is glad to present the first solo exhibition of the Spanish artist Bernardi Roig (Palma, 1965) "Practices to suck the world". The exhibition includes a series of works (sculptures, videos and drawings), all made in recent years, in which the artist reflects, through a specific selection of images, on representation, misunderstanding, repetition, suppression of memory, excess of light, isolation and anxiety caused by external influences.

The exhibition begins with a human figure in actual size put in a corner. The hands are tied behind his back and an amputated leg is replaced by fluorescent neon: the man tries, in a single burst of symbolic possibility, to suck the world from the space around him. Another smaller figure, with disfigured face and sharp nose, covers his ears in order to protect themselves from the roar of a hellish world of sound.

The exhibition is completed by a series of drawings, dominated by the presence of a solitary figure represented at the limit of suffering, and by a video projection: here the artist, in silence, literally sews his mouth in front of a bourgeois audience anesthetized and unable to blink. Since the late 90s, Bernardi Roig has began to explore those experiences which are distressing and obsessive for the human soul. His works sometimes has the same quality of a mirror which traps and deforms our image.

In these years, all the work of Bernardi Roig has developed under the shadow of two questions fundamental to him: how to deal with the iconographic repertoire inherited and how to create, at the same time, a persistent image that throws us from a psychic cliff in a world characterized by repetitive and redundant representations. His work, heavily influenced by literature and cinema, has followed a route marked by the desire of representing the space from both narrative and theatrical perspective.

This exhibition aims to formulate a reflection on the nature of collective perceptions in a world deeply marked by the domination of the media and by the virtual world that, with an excess of images, exceed the individual tolerance limit.

The incessant flow of multimedia signals has established the supremacy of language on the authenticity of experience and has concealed, with an excess of information, what is by its very nature unspeakable: the primary impulses that live in the remotest dephts of our soul.

Bernardí Roig (Palma de Mallorca, 1965) has received, among others, the XXXVII Prize of Contemporary Art Foundation Princess Grace, Monaco (2003); the Official Prize XXI Biennial of Alessandria, Egypt (2002); the Special Prize Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby’s, Foundation Pilar e Joan Miró, Majorca (1997).

He has set up solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum of Bonn (2006), at PMMK Modern Art’s Museum in Belgium (2007), at Contemporary Art Centre of Bragança and at the Phillips Collection of Washington D.C. (2014).

His works has been hosted in many museum and organizations such as Modern Art Gallery of Turin, the Mirò Foundation of Palma (Majorca), the Science Museum of London and the ONU Palace of Nations.