Working by transfers, duplication, erasing, accumulation and exhaustion, the French painter Jean-Baptiste Bernadet aims to let the painting itself direct the process by which it is made. Each of his gestures are either acts of invention or destruction that build a tension between disillusion and hope, pessimism and faith, the taste for the unfinished and the desire of achievement, the will to be clear and the inclination to enigmas. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet describes his paintings as “remains” outliving his certitude of never achieving a masterpiece. The result is a rich, precious and complex surface of his paintings, a polymorphous and unstable body of work, perpetually reinvented, in pursuit by any means of an extreme intensity. There is a skepticism built in to his practice —a humorous dubiety and doubt— that sheds light on the impossibility of painting today in correlation to its necessity.

Benoit Platéus’s work doesn’t neglect any medium — photography, video, drawing or sculpture — in order to search for ambiguities in the most mundane field of visibility. Restless observer, precise, discrete and malicious, he introduces a distance between objects and their perception in order to shift them to the other side, in a space with variable dimensions and multiple interpretations. In this way his art often acts as a psychic apparatus that plays on, questions and reflects the viewer’s perception and consciousness.
Artworks made during Bernadet and Platéus current residencies in New York, along with those made by Bernadet during his recent residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, will be on view in the exhibition.
These residencies are supported by Wallonie Brussels International.

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Jean-Baptiste Bernadet was born in Paris in 1978 and educated at the École 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 at such venues as WIELS, Brussels (2009 and 2010), Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris (2009), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing (2005), and Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels (2004). He has had solo exhibitions at, among others, Torri, Paris (2011), Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, Maes & Matthys, Antwerp, Baronian_Francey, Brussels (2010); Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Brussels, Chapelle des Calvairiennes, Mayenne, France, and Galerie Xprssns, Hamburg (2008); and Konsortium, Dusseldorf (2007). Bernadet lives in Brussels, and he’s represented by Maes & Matthys, Antwerp, Torri, Paris, and Saks, Geneva.

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Benoit Platéus was born in Liège in 1972. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Baronian_Francey, Bruxelles, Belgium (2008) and Galerie Aline Vidal, Paris, France (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Fondation Hippocrène, Paris, France (2011), The state of things, Mamoc, Bejin, China (2010), Changez!, 21Rosendaal, Enschede, Netherlands. (2010), I love benelux, galerie Virgil De Voldere, New-York. (2009), Jeugdzonde, HEDAH, Maastricht, Netherlands. (2009), Un-scene, Wiels, Bruxelles, Belgium (2008), Déformalisme, Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France (2008), and EASTinternational norwich gallery, Norwich, UK (2007). He is represented by Baronian_Francey Brussels. Benoit Platéus lives and works in Brussels.