ART ROTTERDAM

Solo Show Jean-Baptiste Bernadet
TORRI, New Art Section

9 - 12 February 2012
Opening Wednesday8 February, 6pm - 10pm


www.artrotterdam.nl
www.galerietorri.com


Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, Model for the booth

PRESS RELEASE

TORRI is proud to present a solo show of works by Jean-Baptiste Bernadet for its first participation in Art Rotterdam, from February 8 to 12, 2012.

Through transfer, duplication, accumulation, erasure and appropriation, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet multiplies speculative definitions of painting, tracing a subjective, non-linear narrative of his engagement with the medium. These multiple attempts are recorded in every painted mark, but also recounted in every exhibition, each proposing an alternate way of reading the work.

For Art Rotterdam 2012, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet shows an installation comprised of five paintings entitled Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. For journalists, police investigators and researchers, the "five W's (and one H)" are a basic information-gathering tool, a simple way of getting the full "story" on any subject. Since none of these questions can be answered with a simple yes or no, each question elicits a factual response.

Each painting in the installation offers a response to one of these questions. But their slippery, almost liquid, surfaces, repetitive palettes and mechanical but disorderly marks, that seem halfway between appearing and disappearing, suggest that the artist is more interested in letting these questions linger in the air than in offering concrete responses. Deliberately leaving the "why" aside – the most subjective question on the list – the artist evokes our incapacity to understand our world and the extent to which this incomprehension leaves us vulnerable.

Questions and answers remain completely open, indicating the artist's desire to express the inexpressible, echoing the pre-Romantic sublime notion of what paintings evoke. As a contemporary elaboration on this idea, we find what Raphaël Rubinstein calls "Provisional Painting" ("Provisional Painting, Art in America, May 2009). This treatise puts forth the idea that the unfinished, incomplete, accidental, fragile, and unstable allows for "the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting". Despite heterogeneous strategies, provisional painters, with whom Jean-Baptiste Bernadet could be grouped, share "a profound willingness to suspend closure, to leave painting open," to "outplay the paradigm of their medium, and continually baffle it."


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