A distinctive colorist, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet creates within each canvas an atmospheric cosmos, in which nature, emotion, and psyche take center stage. They oscillate somewhere between abstraction and landscape painting: incandescent shades of orange, full and honest purples, sulfuric yellows, deep grays, and melancholic pale greens produce worlds in which a landscape, its unique memory, and the imagination interact, directed by the eye and the mind. In Bernadet’s work, the gaze, insistent and fleeting, melancholy and celebratory, fuses with feeling, envisioned as a suite of emotions, a patchwork of romantic reminiscences and introspections, rapturous exhilaration kindled by the passage of time. Bernadet channels the spirit of Proust in his intimate relationship to memory, his deep desire to transcend linear time. If the ultimate aim of his painting is painting itself, it grants viewers an immense freedom, that of projecting their own experiences onto the canvas.