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Galerie Stefan Röpke presents Practices to Smell the Light, its third solo exhibition of works by the Spanish artist Bernardí Roig. The exhibition includes a collection of works (sculptures and drawings) created this past year, wherein the artist reflects, through his particular store of images, on representation, misunderstanding, repetition, amputation of memory, excess of light, lack of communication, the untranslatable and the anguish of influences.

The tenor of the exhibition is set by a life-size figure, blocked in with his hands tied behind his back, trying, like a symbol of a singular purpose, to lick a light bulb and to energize the empty space around the spectator's body. Another smaller figure, in a desperate attempt to ... smell the light, is crushed by a cascade of fluorescent light. There no longer is a place for the image to adapt to the eye, everything rushes towards an internal abyss.

Since the end of the 80's, Bernardí Roig has been unfolding the disturbing experience of obsession. On occasion, his works have a reflective quality, trapping and deforming our image or placing us on the other side of a theatrical scene waiting for its characters. The scene is always difficult, frozen or pierced by an artificial light.

All the work developed by Bernardí Roig over these years has been produced in the shadow of two questions that are essential to him: how to deal with inherited iconographic repertoires and how to continue to create a persistent image, an image that hurls us towards a psychic precipice, in a world overflowing with images. His work, greatly influenced by literature and cinema, follows a path marked by the narrative and a theatrical approach to space.

The exhibition aims to formulate a reflection on the nature of collective perceptions in an era strongly marked by the domination of the media and the virtual world, which, with the overload of hyper-codified messages, surpasses the individual's threshold of endurance. The endless flow of media signals has established the supremacy of language over the authenticity of experience and, with an excess of information, has hidden that which by its very nature cannot be spoken: the primary drive that inhabits the very basis of awareness. If reason is the expression of language, then pantomime is the expression of the body.

'What does light smell of?' asks Bernardí Roig. And that idea pounds over and over in his brain, torturing him. We can conceal our unease because we know that light only smells of the thoughts that sight can trap and that darkness can lie about, but it doesn't smell of anything. Or so we think...

It is known that flies can smell light, because they are capable of decoding and processing electric signals that are interpreted by some ganglion in their little brains. For a fly, not for us, smell is registered by the polarization of its olfactory neurons which in turn depends on the detection of a volatile molecule by some receptor in its membranes. But we are not yet flies.

Bernardi Roig lives and works in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. He has received numerous honors and awards including the XXXVII Princess Grace Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Monaco (2003); the Official XXI Alexandria Biennial Award, Egypt (2002); the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby's Special Award, Pilar and Joan Miró Majorca Foundation (1997) and the XXI International Biennial of Graphic Arts Official Award, Ljubljana, Slovenia (1995), among others.

His work has been the subject of numberous solo-exhibitions in prestigious institutions around the world, including Da2 Salamanca, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kampa Museum Prague, PMMK Oostende Belgium, and the Museum Carlo Bilotti de Villaborghese Rome, among others. His work has also been included in numerous notable group exhibtions including three in conjunction with the 54th Bienal de Venezia;Shadows Must Dance at Ca'Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna de Venezia, Glasstress in the Palazzo Franchetti, and TRA- Edge of becoming in the Palazzo Fortuny.

Roig's work can be found in numerous museum and institution collections including the Fundació Pilar i Miró a Mallorca, the CCCB Barcelona, the Musee de Beaux Arts de Bruxelles BOZAR, La Tecla Sala Barcelona, the Zhu Qizham Museum de Shanghai, The Alburquerque Museum of Art in New Mexico, La Fundación Telefónica Madrid, and Palazzo Isimbardi Milán, among many others.