| A passion for stone
Life in dryland regions is governed by the collection of water, around which the organisation of land, architecture and social relationships between farmers, livestock, birds and vegetation revolve.
In the limestone landscape of Maestrat, to which Ramon Roig has returned after a long stay overseas, curious dry-stone constructions blend into the terrain: casetes de formiguer, cucurulls or catxerulos (stone huts used as shelters for shepherds), as well as stone-built hunting traps and structures designed to catch birds. Their builders are often said to have a passion for stone, as they display a level of technical and aesthetic ingenuity that goes far beyond functionality. It is hardly surprising, then, that Roig has created a synthesis of these barracas and traps from his homeland, transforming Espai 13 into the setting for a rather unusual hunt.
In this, his first installation, rather than giving three-dimensional form to his pictorial universe – instead of illustrating it – the painter has temporarily stepped aside, allowing his personal pandemonium of forms the chance to be reborn, to emerge once again from nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly. The strategy he employs dates back to the Neolithic: a man waits in a small hut for the bird to come and drink from the water placed outside in piquetes (small receptacles for water), beneath which he has concealed a net. As soon as the bird begins to drink, the man pulls the net, trapping it inside. In Espai 13, the water has been replaced by Indian ink, and the net by a taut rope stretched between barraques, evoking the heightened tension of the hunt.
As you know, an artist’s tools are not those of a farmer. Nor are there many birds in Espai 13. What does float through the space, however, are countless ideas and emerging forms – certainly Roig’s own, but not only his. They also include all those that arise from our own sensitive engagement with the world around us.
If Roig’s traps do not actually catch sparrows,1 they do invite us to take a closer look at the inner workings of the creative impulse, this act of lying in wait for ideas latent within ourselves and in the air, of readying oneself to receive them, and then weaving them together, bringing a form into being, or perhaps even a void. The ink on the receptacles will give them substance, just as heat once revealed the words written in milk on the letters that the Marquis de Sade sent to his wife from the Bastille.
Ramon Roig knows that “he alone holds the key to this wild parade,”2 as Rimbaud once wrote of his own inner world. But for now, he has left the door open…
Mónica Regàs
1 And we take this opportunity to publicly lament this grave culinary omission from his installation.
2 “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.” |
