Artist: Jean-Baptiste Bernadet

Almine Rech Shanghai presents Hot Pink, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

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.