On Holy Thursday, April 20, 2000, I captured the impressions from the preparations for the representation of the Passion of Christ, as well as from the Procession of Verges. With my retina and my camera I was able to capture the different aspects of the Passion and, later, dressed in a tunic, I immersed myself through the streets of this village in the world of images, darkness and sounds of the Procession of Verges and of the Dance of Death.

The more than 500 photographic impressions that I was able to capture and the experiences lived that night, allowed me to start a series of works: drawings, paintings and photographs, on the theme of Holy Thursday of Verges.

In the same way, on Holy Thursday in 2001, I was able to re-enter the traditional magical night of this town. The photographic images, together with all the visual perceptions, have allowed me between the month of April 2000 and the month of March 2002 to make the series of works, titled by myself as, Suite of Verges.

For a long time, Jordi Roca i Rovira, good friend of Rodríguez-Amat and a great connoisseur of all what happens around the magic night of Holy Thursday in the small village of Verges, had spoken to the painter the need to change the costumes of The Dance of Death. The costumes were now more than twenty-five years old and he said that they had to be updated. The painter also knew what happens on that night in Verges because a few years ago he created a series of artworks about this theme. This is a collection composed of 109 drawings and paintings, as well as 89 preparatory studies and also 41 photographs. The artist himself called this series The Suite of Verges.

Once the type of cloth and painting materials to be use have been considered, the artist began to draw the shapes and to paint the bones of the skeletons.

The drawing studies of the nude model and the artistic anatomy studies that the painter did over the years that he spent at the Fine Arts School in Barcelona helped him to shape the design and to paint the skeleton costumes.

Rodríguez-Amat made drawings of all skeletons’ bones before starting to work. He even painted black pieces of material to study in a dim half-light the exact colour of the bones. To reinforce their volume, he added little shadows to the bones in order to achieve the desired final result.

The work was done as follow: First of all, the artist drew the bones directly on the same costumes, placed on dummies, with a special white pencil. Later he painted a thin layer with highly diluted white acrylic paint in order that the paint penetrated perfectly into the fabric. Then he added four new layers of more increasingly thick paint. These layers were stained with different shades of color -a touch of beige, a touch of blue and a touch of black smoke- to give tone to the bones. The primer ensures that the paint adhered to the surface more effectively. Finally, Rodríguez-Amat painted a profile of shade to each of the bones and, in order to achieve more relief, some touches of light on the other side of the shadows.

The work took a lot of hours. The painter invested more than three hundred hours in painting the five costumes, the helmets, the gloves and the slippers. At the same time that he was painting the costumes, Rodríguez-Amat continued with his creative work as an artist.

On Holy Thursday in 2008, after more than three years of work, the costumes finally danced in Verges.