Jean-Baptiste Bernadet — Pollen — Almine Rech Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 15 → May 20, 2023

Almine Rech Paris is pleased to present Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view until May 20th, 2023.

A distinctive colorist, painter of pure sensation, Bernadet elaborates an atmospheric cosmos in each canvas, in which nature, emotion, and psyche take center stage “play the leading roles”. Three new Fugues, additions to one of his most famous series of paintings, punctuate the gallery space. Within these boundless all-over paintings, patterns and images appear and crystallize, then vanish as they come together in infinite new combinations, offering viewers a lasting retinal experience of vertiginous intensity. Incandescent shades of orange, full and frank purples, sulfuric yellows, deep grays, and melancholic pale greens come forward; they seem to dominate the surface of his canvases in a precise geography, then retreat into the distance.

In their singular chromatic relationships, the colors of Bernadet’s Fugues multiply focal points almost to infinity, to create a pictorial space without hierarchy, where every element vibrates and becomes vaporous, suspended in time. The starting point in the creation of each painting, composed of a proliferation of brushstrokes, is often an accident, which later reaches an equilibrium between improvisation, anticipation, and a deliberate mechanical aspect, unmoored from any attempt to communicate through gesture.

Charles Barachon, critic and writer