FUGUE | Jean-Baptiste Bernadet
Apr 6th - May 19th 2017
Bernadet (b. 1978, Paris) currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Inspired by a broad spectrum of art historical precedents, from Monet, Vuillard and Munch in the past to Joe Bradley and Josh Smith in the present. Like his forebears in color painting, Bernadet uses the ways that colors, and their interaction, both activate the senses and allow the viewer to reflect back on the nature of that sensory activation, something which we realize in conditioned by both us and the artist being products of a certain time and place.
"…The Fugue paintings by Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's consist of progressive and systematic thin brush strokes, laying down a flurry of quick marks in his bright, almost pastel palette of oils, mixed with wax and alkyd. There are slight variations in the application of each mark; the overall effect, however, is towards unity, with the field being built up in an all-over fashion.
Bernadet’s goal is to prevent the eye from being able to definitively locate any points of focus. Therefore, any natural analogues suggested in the Fugue paintings, especially of landscape or sky, exist in terms of experience rather than iconography."
(Quoted from a text by Alex Bacon)
