New Signs | Jean-Baptiste Bernadet

Past

Jun 19

June 16th - July 28th, 2023

Alon Segev Gallery is pleased to present New Signs, an exhibition of new works on lava stone by Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, on view from June 16th through July 21st, 2023. New Signs marks Bernadet's third exhibition with the gallery.

A distinctive colorist, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet creates within each of his works an atmospheric cosmos in which nature, emotion, and psyche take center stage. They oscillate somewhere between abstraction and landscape painting: incandescent shades of orange, full and honest purples, sulfuric yellows, deep grays, and melancholic pale greens produce worlds in which a landscape, its unique memory, and the imagination interact, directed by the eye and the mind.

In Bernadet's work, the gaze, insistent and fleeting, melancholy and celebratory, fuses with feeling, envisioned as a suite of emotions, a patchwork of romantic reminiscences and introspections, rapturous exhilaration kindled by the passage of time. Bernadet channels the spirit of Marcel Proust in his intimate relationship with memory and his deep desire to transcend linear time. If the ultimate aim of his painting is painting itself, it grants viewers an immense freedom, that of projecting their own experiences onto the canvas.

Made of glazed lava stone discs fired at 970 degrees, the Signs series perfectly illustrate the artist's desire to create images that contain worlds. Both abstract and evocative of landscapes, they play with the accidents of the material and the firing process to create images. The same sensation of aesthetic displacement is found in the Paesina stone (Florentine limestone), whose marbled patterns, appearing through geological transformations, suggest landscapes without a precise definition of scale between infinitely large and infinitely small. The series title evokes cosmic signs as well as auguries that can be read during divinatory acts.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet (b.1978 in Paris) lives and works in Brussels. He was artist-in-residence at Triangle Studios in Brooklyn in 2012 and Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, in 2010. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Musées de la Citadelle de Villefranche-sur-Mer, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Almine Rech in Brussels, Paris, and London, Marfa Book Company in Marfa, Texas, Alon Segev in Tel Aviv, Mascota in Mexico, Valentin in Paris, Michael Jon & Alan in Miami, American Contemporary in New York City, Karma in New York City, Torri in Paris, Renwick in New York City, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Since 2001, he has also participated in many group shows, including at the Fondation Datris in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Song Museum in Beijing, Almine Rech Gallery in Shanghai, Muhka in Antwerp, NICC in Brussels, Halsey McKay in East Hampton, Ribordy in Geneva, Musée de Valence, Neochrome in Turin, WIELS in Brussels, Super Dakota in Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Angstrom in Dallas, Klemm's Gallery in Berlin, 8 rue Saint Bon in Paris, White Flags in Saint Louis, Missouri, Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing. 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.