The Tosca project by artist Carlos Bernar and Ramón de Vargas is inspired by Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera, TOSCA. This project was promoted and realized by the Museo Universidad de Navarra (MUN) in co-production with the Asociación Gayarre Amigos de la Ópera (AGAO). Carlos played a fundamental role in the development and production of the stage design, under the direction of Liuba Cid, a researcher and specialist in the performing arts with a career spanning more than 50 theatrical productions.
During the stage conceptualization of the opera, Carlos Bernar embarked on a unique artistic journey that begins with the creation of a large abstract pictorial work with a contemporary aesthetic, embodied on a canvas of enormous dimensions (more than 100 m²). This canvas serves as the stage floor for the three acts of the operatic performance. On this vast surface, the singers and actors perform their roles, literally becoming part of the painting, inspired by the materiality of the painting during the performance.
The work becomes a gigantic visual poem that represents the tragic development of the scene, reflecting the intense passion of the great tragic archetypes: love, jealousy, deceit, betrayal, violence, mercy, and revenge. These feelings are captured in the great pictorial work through symbols, metaphors, and textures, born of the artist’s creative imagination, inspired by the plot of the opera itself.
Subsequently, through a process of deconstruction and atomization of the great pictorial work, new resulting works emerge, all related, yet at the same time unique and different. Thus, what previously functioned as a coherent unit is divided, giving rise to individual works with their own character. All the pieces that the artist wants to present at Discovery Art Fair are part of the artist’s TOSCA Series. Canvases with titles such as Gelosa, Occhio, Tempo passa, Vissi D’amore, among others, evoke fragments of the opera’s different acts.
This project also reflects the artist’s conceptual and creative evolution, showing how a work can transform and give rise to new artistic expressions while maintaining a connection to its origin. It is a creative journey that highlights the idea that art can be both a coherent whole and a series of individual pieces.
Ramón de Vargas was a privileged spectator during the premiere of the work. From that moment on, while Carlos Bernar began another journey with the stage floor, leading to what he is today, Ramón de Vargas captured the spectator’s experience in his works through his sculpture and painting. An experience with a complicit gaze that is revealed in his work, through the subtlety of his strokes, which record, as in memory, the passions that Tosca provoked through the plastic intervention of the floor and the interpretation of the orchestra and singers.
As in memory, the recorded memory is different and at the same time similar to what was experienced, and this dialogue can be perceived between the works of the two artists, situated on the same plane and in the same space-time moment.
About the artist Carlos Bernar
Carlos Bernar, in addition to directing the Creative Campus at the Museo Universidad de Navarra, is a multidisciplinary artist who, for 25 years, has developed his creative work by combining various artistic disciplines. This way of learning and understanding art has allowed him to mature in the transmission of concepts through his different expressions.
He discovered oil painting at the age of 13 and consolidated his artistic training with Fine Arts studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, later complementing his training at the Artaquio Academy. During this period, he worked on the fundamentals and techniques of drawing and painting, primarily in figuration. Later, he expanded his drawing and painting studies at the Istituto per l’Arte e il Restauro in Florence and completed his artistic training by studying film at UCLA.
About the artist Ramón de Vargas
Ramón de Vargas is the son of the famous artist “De Vargas”, whose works hang on numerous museum walls around the world. He has absorbed material art from his father, which is reflected in his wooden sculptures, which, in addition to aesthetically and conceptually dialoging with the work of Bernar, are inspired by the Basque artist Oteiza. In this case, they are dialoging with the Tosca project, because they are intended to be presented at the fair as if they were a conceptual representation of the audience attending the opera exhibition. An audience that is overwhelmed by the interplay of jealousy, betrayal, love, and tragedy that Tosca represents.
