Berni Puig: Behind The Wall, There Is A Landscape - Opening Reception

​Behind the wall, there is a landscape is Berni Puig's first solo exhibition in Asia, running from 14 November to 12 December at JW Projects, curated by Ariès Bureau. It brings together thirteen canvases and an installation of two large-scale canvases. Berni Puig (Berga, 1990) has been working since 2021 on the relationship between architecture and the landscape that surrounds it.

​He comes from mural and outdoor painting, where the wall is both a space of action and a witness of time and resistance. This path led him to strappo, a technique historically used to transfer frescoes from churches to museums, which he uses to lift the skin of abandoned walls and turn it into a canvas, carrying with it the memory of a place. In this exhibition, architecture goes beyond being a support and becomes a concept: the building is one more structure within a wider ecosystem of landscape, light and colour.

​These paintings begin in Cal Rosal, near the artist's studio, in buildings left abandoned since the 1990s. When Puig peels a canvas from their white walls, decades of repainting come away with it, and the two-tone rooms typical of the 1960s and 70s reveal a horizon, earth below and sky above: behind the wall, a landscape. In the studio he carries it further with the colours of the land around him, using natural pigments that merge with the original lime paint until it is hard to tell where the wall ends and the painting begins. A meticulous study of colour guides him first; then he lets the process take over, turning, soaking, scratching or burning the canvas until it surprises him.

​For Puig, colour is alive: light transforms it, the land deposits it, time alters it. His painting works the same way, as an open process shaped by matter and time as much as by his own hands.