Shadows Must Dance is an exhibition project conceived specifically for Ca’ Pesaro by Bernardi Roig, one of the most important exponents of the current Spanish art scene. Fifteen of his works – mainly sculptures, but also installations, drawings and videos – made in the last fifteen years are related to the museum’s spaces and masterpieces, creating an active dialogue between images of the past and the present that generates a weave of new meanings and a new emotional dynamic. The sense of the exhibition is making shadows dance again. The exhibition is a co-production of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the IVAM- Institut Valencià d’Art Modern – with the support of the Galleria Cardi of Milan, and curated by Consuelo Ciscar and Silvio Fuso, with Maurizio Caldirola and Daniele Sorrentino. It is being presented in conjunction with the 53rd Venice Biennale and will move to Valencia in November. The IVAM catalogue contains rich, on-site photographic documentation and essays by Consuelo Ciscar, Silvio Fuso, Fernando Castro, Guy Gilsoul, Demetrio Paparoni, Daniele Sorrentino and George Stolsz.

Bernardi Roig has worked at length in the Ca’ Pesaro, selecting works from the museum’s vast collection that are able to establish a relationship with his own work. He has thus constructed an original itinerary and given rise to new expressions of meaning with which to reinvent the works themselves and the place in which they are housed. Bernardi Roig’s work is a reflection on the condition of contemporary man, on isolation, on desire and on immortality. Independently of the media used – sculpture, drawing, video – his creations revolve around the same theme: the captivity of the body and the impossibility of vision. The artist’s well known white sculptures – made with casts of real people – suggest a pathway in which the memory of the image plays a fundamental role. Roig’s work could be said to be a cast of humanity at the brink of a period suffering the loss of historic memory and identity. The inability to grasp new images is the dominant theme and finds a solid metaphor in light: lights, illuminated signs and fluorescent tubes imprison his subjects, dazzling them. From here the artist explores the dynamics of voyeurism and the disturbing dimension of the artistic imagination; he reviews the classic myths, Baroque iconography and memento mori, filtering them through the topoi of post-modern thinking.