Roberto Bernardo was born in Rio de Janeiro but currently lives and works in São Paulo after studying for up to 5 years in London. His paintings show up great sense of formal elements, with an enormous flux of visual information, as well as skilled treatment of the surface and elaboration of color. Besides, he makes use of the chance without ceremony, when he takes advantage with exceptional expertise of the proper nature of the gesso, which he uses as a priming material, creating a fantastic textured surface and an intricate work of color. The nature of gesso, soaking and arresting the paint deep inside until it is saturated with pure color allows him to scrape, rub and work outwards from within the heart of the work, creating an intense feeling of warmth and depth. His colors are intense, even when sometimes somber and difficult to visualize without proper lighting.
Although having attended various art courses and workshops and more than fifteen years of experience, including a sound background in the art market (his father is an art dealer), he considers himself a self-taught artist. He takes advantage of his past memories and has an incredible inner capacity to mentally organize his works beforehand. He doesn’t paint much and is extremely careful technically, doing lots of sketches, testing out different colors and applying paint in an orderly and methodical way. To reach this complex and at the same time subtle structure, Roberto Bernardo executes each movement with the competence of a fencer - although he obviously doesn’t consider himself an action painter -, controlling the flow of paint until reaching a magic moment when everything starts to blend.
There is a sense of obsessiveness in his work. The paintings allude to the idea of compulsiveness and perfectionism. He is interested in exploring contrasting ideas, “making imperfections perfect”, controlling the subject, yet making it appear uncontrolled in a certain way. The incredible pictorial surface Bernardo achieves is down to hours of painstaking effort. It takes sometimes even a month of non-stop work to finalize a large canvas. A closer look reveals fine details and incredible pictorial surface. Roberto scrapes and scratches the surface over and over again until he unearths a satisfying whole image. He normally uses generous amount of paint but he also masters the glazing technique. Sometimes the accumulated paint is sandpapered down and build up again and again. He often leaves visible traces of the process in the finished work. It’s a palimpsest of color and texture, of presence and absence, material and immaterial, once painted and erased, in a continuous dialogue.
He sometimes presents ambiguous compositions, revealing images that resemble landscapes or skies full of clouds, but he is adamant in saying he has no intention of producing something other than purely abstract forms. He clearly indicates a new interest in the painting as object, as the revelation of matter (through the encrusted surface) and of time (through multiple layering, fragments of lettering, etc).He has no interest in finding and explaining deep and intellectual meaning of his work.
Besides his paintings, his sculptures are like blind drawings where one allows the subconscious to work freely. Instead of building up his sculptures in clay, defining the shapes before molding it in plaster, he works with the negative spaces, the inside out so to speak, filling up structures with plaster and letting it occupying every inch of space. He tries to visualize the final piece instead of molding it.
Roberto Bernardo spends his days alone, pacing anxiously before the canvas for hours on end. He usually destroys most of his creations and it takes some effort from his part to stop working on something and to accept that it is “finished”. He has a profound interest in the elaborate process - the “cuisine” of painting -, not just preparing paint, but also the ritual of stretching, priming and sizing the canvas.
He’s been working lately on very large canvases, still with huge amounts of gesso, huge paintings beautifully composed and superbly executed.
