Light Becomes An Oppressive Force In Bernardí Roig's Haunting Sculptures

If Dan Flavin and Francis Bacon's art met, married, and had a child, it might look something like this.

June 5, 2013, 12:59pm

Many artists have toyed with artificial light in their work, sculptor Dan Flavin is one such artist who used fluorescent light tubes for his pioneering minimalist style. But while his fluorescent light tubes feature as abstract components in work that strips a piece back to its essence, Bernardí Roig is a multimedia artist who uses fluorescent light tubes for a menacing and oppressive effect.

Roig's figurative sculptures often depict a bald, tubby guy hauling around bunches of light tubes or collapsing under the weight of them. In these works light isn't something that delivers us from darkness but instead weighs us down. There's even the corpse of a cattle strung up with tubes tumbling out as though they were its innards—it twists this conventional and everyday object into surreal nightmares.

For Roig our relationship to light isn't a biblical one, but instead one caught up with death and mortality where light, or artificial light, is a destroyer, a pollution that permeates our world and stops us from seeing. Much like when you look up into the night sky and the artificial light of our cities has eradicated that of the distant stars.