Works   Biography   Bibliography   Download PDF The French artist Jean-Baptiste Bernadet works in painting and sculpture. His paintings are abstract and come in different sizes, from very small to large. Bernadet may start with some notion of subject — an idea about landscape, for example — but there is no attempt to portray or represent. Similarly, he tries to avoid those marks and markers that have come to signify "abstract painting": big brushy brushwork, gestural sleight-of-hand, etc. Instead his aim is to let the painting itself direct the process by which it is made. An initiating mark, or a color, might act as a hypothesis of sorts, a provisional statement which leads to another, then another. Working by transfers, duplication, erasing, accumulation and exhaustion, more than construction, calligraphy or composition. There is a skepticism built in to the process, a humorous dubiety and doubt.

Sometimes the artist's work features texts-paintings "of," or "with," or "about" words. The texts, usually but not always in English, take the forms of slogans, injunctions, semi-abject confessions : Halo, Vicious, Hola Conquistador, I Will Run After You, Back To Reality, I Want Muscles. Some of these text-snippets are cropped from pop songs, and their vacuity is perhaps part of the attraction — Bernadet has compared himself to a foreign rock musician singing in English. Thus the paintings exhort, croon, bemoan, and babble. The paint handling itself, like any good pop song, is equal parts painstaking exactitude and unabashed glop. (1)

The aim of his work is the impossibility of painting today in correlation to the necessity of painting anyway (2). Each of his gestures, each painting, each exhibition roots on this tension between disillusion and hope, pessimism and faith, taste for the unfinished and desire of achievement, will to be clear and inclination to enigmas. These contradictions in his painting evoke the very same contradictions human being have to face when confronted to love, death, will and destiny.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet describes his paintings as "remains" outliving his certitude of never achieving a masterpiece. The rich, precious and complex surface of his paintings should be sufficient, definitely (3). The result is a polymorphous and unstable body of work, perpetually reinvented, in pursuit by any means of an extreme intensity.

1. David Tompkins, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Chinati Foundation, 2010
2. See Provisionnal Painting, Raphael Rubinstein in Art in America, April 2009 : "Faced with painting’s imposing history and the diminishment of the medium by newer art forms, recent painters may have found themselves outlet in similarly “minor” situations; the provisionality of their work is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting."
3. Jill Gasparina, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Catalogue du 55ème Salon de Montrouge, 2010