Following Roberto Bernardi’s great success in the United States and Europe, the artist returns to Asia, Singapore, with his first solo exhibition at Mucciaccia Gallery, where he will exhibit his sweet and colorful world. 

A leading exponent of hyperrealism, Roberto Bernardi approached American Pop Art when he was living and working in the United States. On one occasion, he visited Dylan’s Candy Bar, the largest candy store in the world, and was amazed at the variety of the candy. Inspired by this modern version of the Willy Wonka Factory with over seven thousand types of candies, he created his first ‘candy’ painting that was a huge success. 

Hyperrealism is the artistic current that aims to obtain a pictorial image similar to a photograph. Painting on canvas in a virtuous and very precise way, Bernardi succeeds by using the glazing method, the ancient technique that consists in applying very diluted oil colors over the underlying layer of color only once it has dried, so to obtain yet another color in transparency, which otherwise would be impossible to achieve. 

With his still life paintings of multicolored and oversized candy, liquorice, lollipops wrapped in cellophane, Bernardi plays on the contrast between different emotions, inventing a dreamlike pictorial dimension. Indeed, Bernardi is not satisfied with the “real” reality: here he seeks (and finds) the traces of a “surreal” reality and uses it to move in each of us our subconscious emotions, to undermine our certainties and project us towards a new dimension. On the one hand the artist would like to send a reassuring message linked to our childhood and the sense of purity and innocence it brings, on the other, with the oversized objects, he gives us the inexplicable sense of restlessness of certain childhood dreams. 

There is nothing more evocative than a colored sugar caramel cake, wrapped in transparent cellophane waiting to be unwrapped. These sweets certainly do bring back childhood memories, and in a playful manner, Bernardi reminds us of our childhood, and those wishes made of sugar, easy to realize and fulfilled after a brief whim. What is more sweeter and evocative .