Page 17 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2001)

’s research
Marco Bernardiis based on
an investigation about the physiological needs that bring
the human being to an artistic creation. Bernardi explores
anthropology and ethnology in order to find elements and
symbols that have been not corrupted by time. Man is an
animal with something more than the others: he has a
consciousness, he is aware about time which passes by, he
can perceives his future, his death and the decadence of
his own civilization, he can testifies his existence, he can
leaves traces of his own experience. Bernardi tries to focus
the results obtained by an “animal specie” which assumes
consciousness of itself, and underlines its own features leaving
traces of its passage through time. It could be said that art
has always been - somehow - the result of this attempt: how
to get consciousness. Bernardi is aware of this, and through
his work he tries to find which impulses have brought the
human being to the invention of an handmade object, or to
the elaboration of a symbolic abstraction. It has to be said
that his works are constituted by elements that are easy to be
red: holes, lines, hands. When someone looks at his sculptures,
he is immediately involved by something familiar, and - as if
he is going virtually back through time - he understands the
richness of such simplicity.
Assuming the physical needs of body limits as starting point
for his work, Bernardi points out the steps that have brought
mankind to the complexity of our actual language, in order to
re-create an idiom comprehensible for everybody because of
the common physical features. We can not represent mankind
separated from its own creations, and each creation referrers
to the previous one. Going back through history, it has to be
possible to give evidence to the mental passages that has
transformed the physiological needs firstly into an object
and subsequently into a symbolic element. Due to those
facts, Bernardi has chosen the vase as dominant icon of
his whole work; The vase is an object typically human and
its function is immutable since ever. The vase it is a sort of
human extension that needs to bring and carry what is body
is incapable to contain.
Bernardi uses industrial resin to make his sculptures, but
he manipulates it in a way that it seems very similar to the
natural one. Resin is a material similar to glass but warmer
and less transparent. Resin is opaque, it has always some
imperfections, and - maybe - it is the closest material to the
ones that constitute the human being. Resin obliges our eyes
to focus what is entrapped inside it, something that is often
mysterious and fascinating.
finally, we can say that Bernardi tries to elaborate a sort of
enigma. If someone would be able to find the solution, it
would be easy to understand the absolute value of human
nature that continues to ask its own identity to models too
much artificial. The artist’s proposal is to begin a journey
throughout the collective subconscious, which preserves the
historical inheritance of the whole humanity. Nevertheless,
this journey could be done only with eyes free from any
cultural deviance.
ANDREA PAGNEs

Bugno Art Gallery sAN MARCO 1996/D, IT-30124 VENEZIA ITALY

+39 041 5231305 info@bugnoartgallery.it www.bugnoartgallery.it