VALENCIA.- A 32-year-old man has been arrested after breaking a sculpture that was on view outside the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM). The sculpture by Bernardi Roig has been valued at Euro 80,000.

The man was detained and arrested at 4:00 AM this past Sunday by policemen after the guard at the museum alerted them of the damage to the sculpture.

An IVAM spokesperson said that the damaged sculpture has been taken to a workshop where Bernardi Roig will look at it when he visits the museum again on January 27, 2010.

Bernardi Roig's works of art (Palma de Mallorca,1965) deal with the human body depicted life-size and incorporating a variable intensity halo of light to which he always concedes a poetic touch of complex meaning.

By placing the body and the light in the middle of his investigations Bernardí Roig tries to reconstruct the essence of the current individual, to incorporate to the body the principles of an action or a dramatic situation, proving his ability to synthesize and clarify the legacy of the inherited languages.

Apart from the technique and the discipline chosen ('materials go back and forth according to the poetic requirements of the concepts') his works are shown as communicating vessels or crossed corridors between our contemporaneous social reality and a distant past.

Bernardi Roig proposes a detailed plan of ideas connected to the heroic fact of a glance by means of his plastic work usually with white sculptures copying real people as a meditation about the sense of the human figure itself being the last and lonely presence.

The figures conceived by the artist go with an excessive drama and a huge dramatization contrasting with its sculptural mutism. Bernardi Roig's characters, since his blindness, are in extreme tense circumstances, imprisoned between reality and desire, and through the challenging glance they try to overcome the delusory representations of a world that crushes us down. These works compel us to search an imaginary imprisonment in our encysted memory. They are just a huge contemporaneous Vanitas built by means of the creative inability to keep on dancing over the image ashes.

The literary signification increases in a special way in this exhibition. The author heads his work towards the scenographical story of his artistic birthday.

"Shadows Must Dance" is the result of the collaboration between the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna Ca Pesaro of Venice and the IVAM.