Berni Puig
Berni Puig (Castellbell i el Vilar, 1990) is a visual artist who lives and works at Konvent, a former late-19th-century convent now repurposed as a contemporary art center. Trained in illustration and printmaking, he began his practice in muralism, approaching the wall not simply as a support, but as a space for action and lived experience. That early relationship with the outdoors —with exposure to the elements, with urban and rural scale, with the body standing before the wall— continues to resonate in his work today. The wall often functions as a canvas, but also as the memory of that initial gesture of painting in the open air.
With Pintura Interior (2021), created in an abandoned house in Cal Rosal, Puig began a process of extraction and displacement: he collected fragments of peeling paint from the interior walls and relocated them —enlarged and rearranged— to the building’s exterior, turning the façade into an echo and extension of its own chromatic memory. This marked a turning point: the wall ceased to be merely a surface of inscription and became an archive, a skin. Characterized by formal precision and rigorous compositional control, this period situates the work between abstraction and geographical specificity, between geometric pattern and the memory of place.
At the same time, he developed a growing interest in color as a living, atmospheric, and site-responsive phenomenon. Projects such as Plein Air, Journée, and Tienda —the latter in collaboration with Anna Benet— explore how light transforms the tones of the landscape throughout the day, and how these variations can become a sensitive record of territory. Color is no longer just composition; it becomes time and exposure.
In the following years, Puig deepened his engagement with the strappo technique —traditionally associated with the removal of Romanesque frescoes— using it to extract fragments of mural, domestic, or graffiti paint from abandoned factories and houses, particularly in the textile colonies along the Llobregat river. This process gives the work a strong material presence and reactivates its connection to the outside world: the piece does not represent the wall but literally incorporates its skin. Strappo thus becomes both an act of displacement and preservation —a removal that transforms the wall into portable memory.
Over time, his practice has evolved toward a more organic process, less governed by strict geometry, while retaining strappo as a foundation due to his sustained interest in materiality and the physical trace of place. In series such as Blaus del blau, Intèrvals, and Gotera, geometry loosens, forms soften, and color gains autonomy, unfolding with a freedom that moves away from initial calculation toward a more atmospheric and permeable logic.
In his most recent work, Puig focuses on rural environments and their minor architectures: tool sheds, lean-tos, precarious structures, ruined buildings, and the interstitial spaces between houses. He is drawn to margins and voids, to what often goes unnoticed. His engagement with territory is not monumental but attentive and intimate —a way of cataloguing the involuntary memory inscribed on surfaces and within cracks. In this sense, his practice increasingly moves away from representation to construct its own system of signs, where color, matter, and fragment enter into dialogue with time and place.
