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Bernardo, entre pitas con moscas
chronicle of a creative process
High summer in Almeria, south of Spain. It was excessively hot. Unbearably, for me, but for Bernardo too. And that is the point:. There is a fine and apparently tempting line between the tolerable and the anxiety-attack rendering effect of a hundred flies swarming around you as you sketch the scene at one to one directly onto a dozen wooden panels measuring 80x60cm and each one of a non negligible weight. The line tips the other way after around 11. Thus, in this short window of opportunity, contrary to what the rough and rapid brushstrokes might suggest, the logistics of the exercise are well planned and controlled, ritualised over a period of several days.
Leaving us to sleep, he takes take off early and drives into the nearby dunes that
indifferently testify to the real estate aspirations of a generation. Kilometres of paved roads lined with electricity posts in waiting permeate this landscape. Up a mound of grey earth, the panels upheld by an ad-hoc structure await, as does the paint and the insect repellent. The hat and the water, he brings with him daily. This, to paint a landscape with plants in the first plan apparently.
We don?t attend these sessions, only going to help him carry down the panels on the last day. Stricken by the visceral aggression of the environment, we descend them most efficiently in ant like manner, one by one loading them into the car boot. Still wet and held apart by bottle lids, they are transported to Chinchon where the colour is to be applied. In the car, we laugh about the madness of this enterprise and find ourselves curious all the more to see what he makes of that landscape that took his fancy atop this mound of grey earth.
There is complicity between a place, its representation and the person though which it is rendered and I think that for Bernardo the representation is really secondary to this encounter with place and, with colour subsequently. Like many of his paintings, this landscape, transmits a very simple joy of being and feeling there.
by Natalia Petkova
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