The artist Bernardi Roig (Palma, 1965) exhibits Goya’s Head at The Phillips Collection museum in Washington DC. The exhibition, which includes 55 drawings by the island creator that the museum acquired two years ago, opens a dialogue with the paintings of Francisco de Goya that the American institution itself has. Highlights the Repentance of Saint Peter, the work of the most important Aragonese painter in the collection. The exhibition will officially open this Friday the 10th as Special Exhibition during the Annual Gala celebrating The Phillips Collection and can be seen until July 7.
Goya’s head refers to the exhumation of the body of one of the most famous Spanish painters, in 1888, in the Bordeaux cemetery, where he died, alone and in exile, on April 15, 1828. When they extracted the body from the tomb, Goya was missing his head, which It was never found.
Confinement
From this fact, Roig created, during the confinement due to the pandemic, a collection of drawings based on the stolen head. «Every day I went to my studio, very close to my house, in Binissalem, but nothing happened,” he points out. «I had been paralyzed for more than a month, and one afternoon the anxious, deformed and anchorless faces of the characters from Goya’s Aquelarre, with the famous phrase of the Greek painter Apeles de Colofón, Nulla dies sine linea (Not a day without drawing a line)“, Explain.
«My head exploded, and I made a drawing every day for 55 days. Only one a day. The first on May 1 and the last on June 24. Goya is one of the columns that have sustained my artistic adolescence. My first visits to Prado Museum They always took me, after greeting Velazquez already Zurbarandirectly to be swallowed by the Black Paints. In that room I learned to look, and I remember that when I left I was always hungry,” highlights the Mallorcan.
The series is the journey in images of that decapitation. There are 55 drawings on poor paper measuring 40 x 30 centimeters, “an attempt to embody, in the trembling of a hand that he draws, the possibility of a multi-faceted portrait of the missing head,” he says. “Twisted images, as in a monologue, with the purpose of capturing the remains of frontality that exist in the recesses of a face before they escape through one of its orifices,” she adds. «These drawings made with charcoal, graphite and wax make up a linear frieze and multifacial of Goya’s absent head but, at the same time, they could be my definitive self-portrait, finally freed from the slavery of appearances,” concludes Roig.
