Jean-Baptiste Bernadet produces the Fugue paintings through a deceptively simple technique. He builds up a field by taking a thin brush and progressively and systematically, if always intuitively, laying down a flurry of quick marks in his often-bright palette of oils mixed with wax and alkyd. There are slight variations in the application of each mark; the overall effect, however, is towards unity, with the field being built up in an all-over fashion. Bernadet’s goal is to prevent the eye from being able to definitively locate any points of focus such that, as he paints, the artist constantly adjusts any passages that seem to jump out at him.

For this reason, any natural analogues suggested in the Fugue paintings, especially of landscape or sky, exist in terms of experience rather than iconography. His carpets of undulating color vibrate in the eye suggest how one might feel standing in a landscape, a light breeze rusting the grass, and causing a pond to sparkle, rather than directly indexing the literal view one would have. (Excerpted from Alex Bacon’s essay, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet Between Spectacle And Subversion, 2017)