Bernardí Roig...

8:17 p.m.

Early March 1895. San Corró Estate, Costix, Mallorca. A farmer, with a broken back from working so hard, proposes to his foreman to move some huge rocks to expand the planting area and thus get more out of the land.

At dusk, once the first stones have been moved and part of the area has been dug, the tip of the hoe hits a metal object, followed by the appearance of imposing horns. It was then that the farmer uttered the crucial phrase: Hem arrivalt a l'inferni (We have arrived at hell!)

That metallic sound, the result of the misplacement of the hoe, is the origin of “Caps [y] Bous-The third horn”.

The installation that Bernardi Roig (Spain, 1965) presents at the Archaeological Museum of Madrid is based on this story. It is an ascending minimalist and illuminated structure that covers a bull's head with three horns, one of them golden. This tower of light that holds the head is quite extraordinary, although it is difficult to discover the head because it is camouflaged in the whiteness of the exterior pieces

El tercer cuerno, by Bernardi Roig (2024)

Materials: Expanded polystyrene, LED and aluminum / Dimensions: 500 x 150 x 150 cm

The Bous de Costix may never have existed but they were idolized, protected and even buried. They represented fears, defeats and hallucinations, although they never had a body. That is why in the absence of torso and limbs they hung from walls, posts or were supported on columns.

The Third Horn is the metaphor that expands the truth of the object found, we are the visitors who, after seeing the head, come to believe that it could have existed and that in its aura we find the meaning of magical or religious origin.