Practices to Suck the World（2014），Polyester resin, marble dust and light，200 × 40 × 40 cm，Courtesy of Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art

ViennaSpanish artist Bernardi Roig engages with a range of media spanning sculpture, installation, video, and drawings. Oftentimes referencing the human figure in his artistic corpus, his white sculptures—casts of real people—represent a journey to a mythological past.

Practices to Suck the World is a plastic reinterpretation of the myth of Diana and Actaeon. The young hunter, Actaeon unwittingly stumbles across a nude Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, while she bathes in a spring with her escort of nymphs. In embarrassed fury, Diana splashes water upon Actaeon, transforming him into a deer. Roig, capturing a moment of bestial tension, turns Actaeon into a statue in a paradoxical process that could be understood as the second metamorphosis of the hunter, after having been turned into a prey.

“Actaeon’s transformation is the moment of infinite incommunicability. Actaeon has seen what he will never be able to tell, and is trapped in absolute silence.”, stated Roig. In face of this representation of eternal silence, the viewer is confronted with the ambiguities caused by the distrust of representation and language.