Programme

WHAT DOES BEAUTY KNOW OF TIME?

The present is a cracked stone wall. The past is the dust of days gone by, and the future is an unpredictable breeze. Or that’s what those people believe who have never seen the world from the stage. Moving between time and reality, Jordi Bernadó's gaze focuses on a privileged space, an illusory location that defies borders and turns certainties into smoke. The photographs in What does beauty know of time delve into the world of spectacle, a space that lies between fiction and reality where time is magically, momentarily, suspended. The artist travels through the world of performance, taking a closer look at the voices that ring out from inside theatres; beyond the masks and props, there is a type of truth that is only found on the stage: beauty. A striking and enigmatic beauty, impossible to define or possess, like a spirit. It fills great concert halls, opera houses, concerts; it is present at every show, floating, latent, relentless.

This exhibition brings together a significant part of Bernadó's artistic work. His work orbits around space, identity and ambivalence: it combines aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities with a gaze that is both analytical and evocative. These photographs show theatres, stages, circuses, museums; some iconic, others more difficult to identify. The artist turns them all into visual battlegrounds, an oasis of meaning where pretence and truth coexist without limits.

What does beauty know of time? explores the blind spots in a spectacle, the hidden moments between what we see and what we think we see. Photographs are a window—sometimes a mirror, sometimes a mirage—to fleeting objects of desire; through them, hidden stories, erased images, and forgotten memories emerge. And from these transient spaces, Bernadó meditates on art and artifice, on hope, virtue and truth. On time and obsolescence. Eternity, utopia. The result is a unique portrait of the world of spectacle: the literal gives way to the uncertain; the unequivocal becomes questioning. Anything can happen on stage, even the most unexpected occurrence. The present trembles, consciousness breaks, there is no past or future, only an open parenthesis. And then, magic. Silence. Light. What does beauty know of time?

Amanda Mauri

In collaboration with the Senda Gallery