Jean-Baptiste Bernadet: Open Studio at the Locker Plant

Reception for the artist on Thursday, December 30th, 2010 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.

The Chinati Foundation is pleased to host an exhibition and reception for French born artist Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. His paintings are abstract and come in different sizes, from small and intimate to large-scale and enveloping. 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 gestures that have come to signify “abstract painting”. 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. Sometimes the artist’s work features text-paintings “of,” or “with,” or “about” words. The texts can take the forms of slogans, injunctions, places, or semi-abject confessions. Some 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. The paint handling itself, like any good pop song, is equal parts painstaking exactitude and unabashed glop.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet was born in Paris in 1978 and educated at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, France, and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels-La Cambre in Brussels. He has participated in many group shows since 2000 and has had solo exhibitions at Maes & Matthys, Antwerp; Baronian Francey, Brussels (2010); Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Brussels; Chapelle des Calvairiennes, Mayenne, France; Galerie Xprssns, Hamburg (2008); and Konsortium, Dusseldorf (2007). Bernadet lives in Brussels.