Jean-Baptiste BERNADET / SOLO SHOW MAES AND MATTHYS GALLERY ANTWERP JAN 10 / WHAT HAPPENS HERE STAYS HERE

WHAT HAPPENS HERE, STAYS HERE
SOLO SHOW at Maes & Matthys Antwerp
21 January - 6 March 2010

WHAT HAPPENS HERE, STAYS HERE
Devrim Bayar, translation Emmanuel Guy

JB Bernadet’s first paintings were on the fringes abstraction, before he introduced words into his paintings with the sentence « I have lost my illusions. » Drawing an extraordinary energy and creativity from a consciousness of loss, this pivotal work marked the beginning of an extremely fertile series of word paintings.
The choice of the English language by a French artist immediately raises doubts about his sincerity. Bernadet uses clichés or quotations, “ready-made-sentences”, that could at once be dramatic confidences and B-movie dialogues. This ambiguity between the touching authenticity of personal revelations and contempt for the modern world’s commonplaces of communication and self-construction pervades the whole series of word paintings.Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s words strike the viewer with immediate and expressive force as they jump out of the background. The artist uses decentered compositions or recycles abandoned works, which appear from underneath new creations, he smudges the paint and lets the garish colours run. This process gives the final product an extreme intensity, which I shall name, after the artist’s own (painted) word, “hhardeur”.
For his first solo show at Maes & Matthys, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet presents a new series based around the legendary Las Vegas slogan “What Happens Here Stays Here”, which sets the tone of the exhibition. Applied to painting, this phrase undermines the emotional and intellectual impact commonly ascribed to aesthetic experience. Don’t ask here to be transported by the artwork: what happens here, stays here – within the canvas, within the frame, within the gallery.

However, the paintings themselves seem to belie this rather neutering statement. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s painting is in fact distinctly expressive. His recent work, mainly done in the last few months, testifies to a (re)turn towards abstraction. Layers of pink, blue, yellow, tinge the black, the artist’s favourite colour. Through this layering of colours, which sometimes lets the wooden surface beneath show through, Bernadet creates a particular palette: the artist’s impetus seems to be emotional rather than intellectual.
At first sight, the paintings are arranged in a linear fashion and without hierarchy. The regular spaces between these images of the same format create a cinematic rhythm. This contributes to the sensation of a flow running through the works. The recycled images and words, the smudged surfaces, the interwoven layers, the hybridisation of references and levels of language create a collection at the same time chimeric and highly coherent. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet engulfs us in an inescapable magma, where “what happens here, stays here.”

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet was born in Paris in 1978, he has lived and worked in Brussels since 2000. His painted work and his installations have been exhibited in group shows at Maes & Matthys Gallery in Antwerp, at Wies in Brussels, at the Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris, at the Galerie Frédéric Desimpel in Brussels, at the Ecole Supérieur d’Art de Metz. He has also had solo shows at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Brussels, at Stand in Lyon, at the Xprssns Gallery in Hamburg, at the Chapelle des Calvairiennes in Mayenne and at the Konsortium in Düsseldorf.
At the end of 2010, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet will be the artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

MAES & MATTHYS GALLERY
Micheline Maes - Luc Matthys
Pourbusstraat 3
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
+32 (0) 478 48 50 31
info(at)maesmatthys.be
Wednesday - Saturday: 2pm - 6pm