JEAN-BAPTISTE BERNADET: SUCCESSO EVIDENTE (HIDDEN TRACKS)

Almine Rech Brussels is pleased to present 'Successo Evidente (Hidden Tracks)'  Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

January 16 - March 1, 2025

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.

The painter’s fascination with the idea that the work comes to fruition when, after many adjustments, it begins to look like the result of an agreeable happenstance, also implies that what makes the work ‘work’ is always up for debate. 'Successo Evidente (Hidden Tracks)' centers the aforementioned question around a group of paintings that acts as a series of arguments and counterarguments. The first half of the exhibition title stems from one of the small sign paintings that regularly punctuate the artist’s journey. Scribbled with paint and glitter on a crummy piece of wood, the statement could bring to mind the promise of a trickster or the sincere inquiry of an artist in the studio. As a question, it is earnest and bit snarky at the same time—again, one type of behavior never fully excludes the other.

These paintings evoke the operation of a scanner going over a flat surface flooded by the impressions of a world in motion. Backgrounds and foregrounds hover undecidedly, like translucent screens against which our own impressions are given a chance to reassemble in a certain order.