Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present Hot Pink, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from October 25 to December 28, 2024.
Bringing together paintings from different series, this presentation is unified by a singular chromatic color palette—a gradation from pink to blue, passing through mauve and purple.
In Bernadet’s work, the gaze is insistent yet fleeting, it is at once melancholic and celebratory like a patchwork of romantic reminiscences, introspections and rapturous moments of exhilaration kindled by the passage of time. Here, the pink and blue tones reference both the tactile sensations of skin touch, and the time of day when the mind follows daylight as it hovers between twilight and dusk. A recent painting made on an empty pack of Calvin Klein men underwear, epitomizes Bernadet’s approach to painting. For him, painting shows as much as it conceals, it is a physical site of desire caught between the mundane and fantasy, proximity and distance.
Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s four paintings are accompanied by "It’s pink" (2024), a text piece by Maxime Fauconnier (b.1989, lives and works in Brussels), an assemblage of quotes from film dialogues following the words "it's pink". Presented in the space as a stack of free posters, Fauconnier’s poem doubles as the exhibition text.
This project is part of the Shanghai Art Week, France is In! program organized by the French Embassy in China, in partnership with the Institut Français (Paris), to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of France-China diplomatic relations and the Franco-Chinese Year of Cultural Tourism.
