Jean-Baptiste Bernadet: Painting the Atmosphere

Some paintings do not assert themselves on the eye but slowly envelop it, like a scent spreading through the air. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s canvases inhabit precisely this perceptual threshold, where the image seems to emerge and dissolve at the same time. With his new exhibition in Shanghai, the French artist continues a line of research that turns painting into an atmospheric experience, suspended between presence and disappearance. Often compared to clouds or colored vapors, Bernadet’s works resist any clear distinction between abstraction and representation. Diffused color fields, chromatic vibrations, and forms without stable contours create “all-over” surfaces in which every element carries equal visual weight. Beneath this apparent lightness lies a carefully calibrated balance, built on unresolved tensions and a controlled gesture that conceals the artist’s labor behind a sense of ease. In Vetiver (Shanghai), color takes on the quality of luminous smoke: explosive yellows break through the canvas, while blues, greens, and purples hover as if searching for a place to settle. More than images to be decoded, these works function as perceptual states, afterimages that linger in the viewer’s eye. Bernadet does not paint smoke, he makes it happen, inviting the audience to pause within a pictorial space where time stretches and vision becomes a sensory experience.