Jean-Baptiste Bernadet

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet Songs of the Sky

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet Songs of the Sky

October 5 - November 17, 2023

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet The Songs of the Sky

Color isn’t static in Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s paintings – it vibrates and unfolds like an event. Particles of color populate the canvas and other substrates alike to form a flow of light and energy that channels bits and pieces of pictorial matter gleaned with nonchalance from Vuillard, Gerstl or Sérusier to name but a few. The complex visual surfaces he creates tend to defy reproducibility. His paintings aren’t just optically challenging, they seem to already be re-presenting the reproductions of something, even though that thing could also be the painting itself, showing us its precarious coming into existence in a state of perpetual doing and undoing.

Bernadet’s Fugues notably thrive on the paradoxical kind of lyrical distortion that occurs through the quasi-mechanical rendering process they entail. Various types of indexicality coexist in his abstractions, thereby making it unclear if things began with the sky itself, the snapshot of a mediterranean sunset, the distant memory of american skies, Proust’s description of crimson and golden clouds as “indomitable warriors” when he was a young student, or just the crumpled color photocopy of a Monet painting. The artist isn’t merely blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, he is playing a flirtatious game with the increasingly elusive distinction between what constitutes an impression, an expression and a transcription. In other words, his Fugues deal with the notion of equivalence.

This notion of equivalence is famously associated with a series of photographs of clouds that kept Alfred Stieglitz busy from 1922 until the early thirties.

Although Stieglitz wrote down eight reasons that potentially motivated his endeavor, including his attempt to emulate music, interpreters were quick to focus on the most simple and reductive explanation. “A photograph of the sky might be a container, so to speak, of the photographer’s essence” and function as “equivalents of [his] most profound life experience.”1

1 John Szarkowski, The Sky Pictures of Alfred Stieglitz, MoMA, Autumn 1995, No 20 (Autumn 1995)

There is a subtle irony in Bernadet’s cooption of the earlier title that Stieglitz gave to this series. For Bernadet to invoke the Songs of The Sky is to queer late modernism’s romantic darkness and introduce a productive ambivalence as to what self-expression means for a painter or a photographer trading in abstraction today. Here, there is no grand statement regarding the historically complicated relationship between painting and photography.

Instead, the two are given enough space to maintain a mutually advantageous relationship like friends with benefits. Correspondingly, Bernadet is not trying to give us a portal to his soul, nor is he fulfilling the avant-garde agenda of painting like a machine. If postproduction could mean something to a painter, the artist seems to be giving us the after effect of things as opposed to the typically impressionist effect of rain or effect of snow. The way in which he democratically allocates the intensity of perception in his work shows us a way to consider painting as a fascinatingly unstable mediating tool – another idea of painting as a medium.

- Emile Rubino

Untitled (Fugue), 2023

Oil and cold wax on canvas 78½ x 44½ in.

Untitled (Fugue), 2023

Oil and cold wax on canvas 78½ x 44½ in.

Untitled (Fugue), 2023

Oil and cold wax on canvas 78½ x 44½ in.

Untitled (Fugue), 2023

Oil and cold wax on canvas 78½ x 44½ in.

Untitled (Fugue), 2023

Oil and cold wax on canvas 78½ x 44½ in.

Untitled (F

Oil and cold 44½ x

Fugue), 2023

wax on canvas 78½ in.

Untitled (F

Oil and cold 44½ x

Fugue), 2023

wax on canvas 78½ in.

Untitled (F

Oil and cold 44½ x

Fugue), 2023

wax on canvas 78½ in.

Untitled (Fu

Oil and cold w 44½ x 7

ugue), 2023

wax on canvas 78½ in.

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

Untitled (Ball), 2023 Oil on steel 6 in. in diameter

JEAN BAPTISTE BERNADET (b. 1978) An exceptional colorist, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet constructs atmospheric worlds in his paintings, where nature, sensation, and the psyche are front and center. In a carefully constructed in-between zone bounded by abstraction and landscape painting, his incandescent oranges, full, candid purples, sulfurous yellows, faded pale greens, and deep grays produce worlds where a landscape, its unique memory, and the imagination interact, directed by the eye and the mind. In Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s work, the act of looking, which is both transitory and continual, melancholic and elated, joins feeling, which is here envisioned as a series of emotions, a patchwork of romantic recollections and introspections, whirling perceptions inspired by the passage of time. In his intimate relationship to memory and his deep desire to transcend linear time, the work of Jean-Baptiste Bernadet is similar to the Proustian spirit. Ultimately, the purpose of his painting is painting itself, all the while giving viewers the freedom of projecting their own experiences onto the surface. Born in Paris in 1978, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet lives and works in Brussels, and was artist-inresidence at Triangle Studios in Brooklyn in 2012, APT Studios in Brooklyn in 2011, and Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, in 2010.

His solo exhibitions include, among others, Musées de la Citadelle de Villefranche-sur-Mer (2023), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (2020), Almine Rech in Brussels (2022, 2020, 2016), Marfa Book Company in Marfa, Texas (2019, 2015, 2013), Alon Segev in Tel Aviv (2019, 2017), Almine Rech in Paris and Mascota in Mexico (2018), Valentin in Paris (2021, 2017, 2015), Michael Jon & Alan in Miami (2017), Almine Rech Gallery in London (2016), Retrospective in Hudson, NY, American Contemporary in New York City, Rod Barton in London (2014), Karma in New York City (2014), Torri in Paris, Renwick in New York City (2011), the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2010).

Since 2001, he has also participated in many group shows, including at the Fondation Datris in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (2022), Song Museum in Beijing and Almine Rech Gallery in Shanghai, Muhka in Antwerp (2019), NICC in Brussels, Halsey McKay in East Hampton, Ribordy in Geneva (2018), Musée de Valence (2016), Almine Rech in Paris, Michael Jon & Alan in Miami, Neochrome in Turin (2015), WIELS in Brussels (2015, 2010 and 2009), Valentin in Paris, Ricou Gallery and Super Dakota Gallery in Brussels (2014), Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (2013), Angstrom in Dallas, Texas, Klemm’s Gallery in Berlin (2012), 8 rue Saint Bon in Paris, White Flags in Saint Louis, Missouri (2011), Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris (2009), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing (2006).

Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain / Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Roveretto, MAC VAL Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Collection des Arts Plastiques de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Mac’s Musée des Arts Contemporains de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Thalie Foundation, amongst others.

Published on occasion of the exhibition Jean-Baptiste Bernadet

Songs of the Sky October 5 - November 17, 2023 William Shearburn Gallery 665 S Skinker Blvd St. Louis, MO 63105 314.367.8020 www.shearburngallery.com

IMAGE CREDITS: Hugard & Vanoverschelde and William Shearburn Gallery