Jean-Baptiste Bernadet regards his process as 'extending and repeating an open-ended protocol', while retaining accident and chance as a characteristic of his paintings despite them often appearing similar to one another. A painter of mark and colour, Bernadet explores how these elements can complement each other to evoke a sensation or vision beyond the pictorial space.
Read MoreTypically working on a medium to large scale, Bernadet presents swathes of undulating colour constructed through small, systematically repeated strokes of oil paint mixed with alkyds and wax. Eliminating distinct focal points to achieve a variegated uniformity, the artist blends sensual pastel and jewel tones in an exercise in conscious yet transcendental perception. Untitled (New Day) (2018) heroes sky blue in a motley, dispersed formation, while the multidirectional sunset hues of Untitled (Mirage) (2018) emanate a warmth and vigour independent of visual representation.
In a 2016 interview with Anne Pontégnie, Bernadet stated: 'One of my two main goals is above all to load the paintings with a maximum amount of intensity. ... [I believe] that only painting can offer an image more resistant than those present in advertising, on the internet... Therein lies the will to work on a visual surface until it becomes sufficiently rich and complex to never be reproducible... My second goal is perhaps to instil lyricism into my work and that could be what I call sensitivity... They are like a projection screen for the viewer. The paintings aren't abstract or figurative but are indexical. I'm not interested in what one might see or recognise in them but rather the possibility to see or recognise something in them.'
Bernadet's acclaimed 'Fugue' series (2013—ongoing) comprises dozens of works painted in a recurring palette, featuring iridescent shades of fuschia, gold, turquoise, violet, and tangerine. Later iterations of 'Fugue' have seen the works take on the form of a folding screen, as in Untitled (Fugue - Screen IV) (2018), and an immersive 12-painting panoramic installation reminiscent of Claude Monet's 'Water Lilies' series at Musée de l'Orangerie. However, while the Impressionists sought to represent the shifting effects of light on everyday scenes, Bernadet's paintings present internal perspectival shifts, and take into consideration the effects of external light and space on the viewer's perception of a work.
Critic and curator Alex Bacon has written: 'The Fugue paintings operate as a center point or fulcrum for Bernadet's practice as a whole. On one level this is formal, in terms of the artist's interest in colour, and in an art historical tradition of colouristic, optical painting... On a conceptual level, these paintings exemplify Bernadet's interest in exploring and questioning the nature of perception in our moment. Like his forebears in colour painting, Bernadet uses the ways that colours, and their interaction, both activate the senses and allow the viewer to reflect back on the nature of that sensory activation, something which we realise in conditioned by both us and the artist being products of a certain time and place.'
