Artists

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet

Press release

Almine Rech Brussels is pleased to present 'Successo Evidente (Hidden Tracks)'  Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 16 to March 1, 2025.

How do you define success? The perennial question often associated with cheap self-help books and awkward job interviews looms large in the realm of painting. Indeed, not everyone likes to hear that some paintings ‘just happened’ like a lucky snapshot. If seamlessness can fascinate by suggesting painstaking work or the triumph of automation, there is something reassuring about visible traces of labour and frustration—people like to know it didn't come easy. In art, satisfaction is nothing unless you’re testing how little you can do and how bad you can make it, but these transgressions are short-lived. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s multifarious approach to painting blurs the line between these contradictory sets of beliefs and attitudes, so much so that in his work, the terms of success can be seen as a subject in its own right.

In his most well-known series, such as Fugue or Vetiver, the artist uses as little paint as possible and works hard to conceal the labor that goes into achieving the sense of efficacy that often defines his all-over compositions. Even as they result from the accretion of micro events on the surface of the canvas, these paintings tend to follow a criteria by which they shall appear like found compositions akin to paesina stone, tie-dye shirts, weathered photocopies, phosphenes, stains and sunsets. To this effect, he has learnt how to cover his tracks by hand and paint himself out of the canvas.

— Émile Rubino, artist and writer