The exhibition I confess, because I confess suggests a parallel between art and religion. To confess is to reveal a secret. to uncover a hidden truth, to expose oneself to the gaze of others. An exhibition is thus, in some ways, a confession. Robert Meyer, a Dutch artist who has lived in Barcelona since 1988 and shown

his work in various galleries and cultural centres in Holland, Germany and Spain, now presents us with an exhibition in the Sant Roc Chapel in Valls

that revolves around the theme of confession. I confess, because I confess includes five different works: Lost in a Memory; Listen, man, listen; Safe-sex;

The Spirit Of Painting and Subject/Object. Each of them has a meaning in its own right yet takes on a broader significance when the exhibition is seen as a whole. They are made of industrial materials and everyday items —objects of fiction, despite their plausibility— through which a powerful scene is achieved

rcreating an ambiguous, religious-like atmosphere. Nevertheless these objects reveal the artist’s profoundly iconoclastic thought and express themselves

through an extremely rationalist, cold, perfectionist and perverse language. A language based on irony, on the ambiguity of the images, objects and concepts

in a game of puns, double meanings, and trompe l’oeil of the senses and the spirit. Taking art as his standpoint, his discourse is about people and

society and their relation to religion and truth. I confess, because I confess? What is confession if not a path leading to the truth?

And what is art if not a tool for finding one’s own truth? Is truth, then, the ultimate objective of this exhibition? Rather, it is pointing up the difficulty of bringing out the truth, secrets and guilt. This is the purpose for which Robert Meyer establishes a parallel between religious Objects and objects of a markedly social or worldly nature. In this way a safe is at the same time a tabernacle or a picture, a confessional can also be a guillotine and a chasuble can become a canvas.

This ambiguous usc of liturgical symbolism and ecclesiastical iconography points to a concern that has very little to do with theological thought or religious sentiment. On the contrary, in Robert Meyer’s work, there is no God as the ultimate reference point, there is no mysticism to cling on to, there is no pity,

forgiveness or salvation. There is only art td manifest this guilt, to open up the game of truth, to obtain forgiveness.

Esperança Rabat