BERNI PUIG

A dripping leak is a silent and stubborn presence. No one invites it, yet it slips in all the same. Drop by drop, it finds its path—unhurried, relentless—leaving its mark on the walls, the beams, the memory of the space. Time works in much the same way: it seeps into the cracks of matter, erodes it, transforms it into a living archive of all that once was. In Gotera [Drip], Berni Puig translates this idea into his artistic practice, crafting a cartography of presence and absence, of traces that whisper untold stories.

The project began in an abandoned apartment block in Cal Rosal, a former industrial hub now in decline, where Puig started intervening in the space in 2021. Uninhabited for over two decades, the building is in a state of organic decay: water leaks, roots splitting through walls, vegetation creeping through broken doors, swallows nesting by shattered windows. The artist embraces this slow collapse as the starting point for his pictorial exploration, working directly on the walls of a place doomed to be forgotten.

Puig inhabits and transforms it, and using the strappo technique, he peels away fragments of paint from the surfaces—carrying with them not only color, but texture, fissures, and the remnants of time. The resulting work is not a mere representation of place, but a physical translation of it—a displacement of its skin, its material memory. As though the building it self had shed its outermost layer to be contemplated elsewhere.

This process gives rise to an inevitable duality: what remains in the building is the negative, the void that reveals a former presence. What arrives in the gallery is a synthesis of space and time—a record of light, matter, and chance. The colors in Gotera‘s works emerge from landscapes mostly Mediterranean, from Catalonia and Mallorca, and volcanic too, such as the island of Lanzarote. The artist photographs fixed reference points every hour, from morning until evening, and extracts dominant tones from those images, arranging them into chromatic cells. In this way, each piece captures the subtle rhythm of a specific moment, a kind of visual diary of light and its interplay with the world.

In this sense, Gotera is more than an exhibition—it is an experience that speaks to impermanence, to the beauty of what vanishes, and to how art can hold the fleeting still. Like in Proust’s writing, where a single sensation unravels endless memories, Puig works with the ruins of forgotten architecture to turn them into metaphors of remembrance. And so, like a drip that never ceases, art always finds a crack through which to seep in and reinvent what we thought was lost.