WHAT HAPPENS HERE, STAYS HERE

JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET
22 JANUARY - 6 MARCH 2010
OPENING THURSDAY 21 JANUARY, 6-9 pm

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 picture, within the exhibition, 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.”



MAES & MATTHYS GALLERY
Pourbusstraat 3
2000 Antwerpen Belgium
+32 (0) 478 48 50 31
www.maesmatthys.be

http://www.jb-ba.com/