Hyper-realistic drawing, psychedelic colors, saturated spaces, very tight closeups (on improbable eyes of abyssal creatures or luminescent trees), the absence of horizon and perspective…
At the borders of reality and fiction, Romain Bernini’s paintings plunge us into a troubled universe, both familiar and strange: a closed world with acidulous and washed-out colors, similar to a show stage flooded with bright lights, a sort of flashy no-man’s land or Interzone, to use the title of one of his paintings.
We see man confronted with the animal and natural phenomena, not as a tamer or predator, but as a “simple observer” – a solitary and circumspect, or perhaps worried, observer.
Them and Us, them and me, the title chosen by the artist for this exhibition, reflects this mixture of distancing and proximity between man and animal that he stages in a strange face to face, which he maintains with us. It is a double feeling of familiarity and strangeness that we feel when looking at his paintings.
Associating heterogeneous elements, even antinomic (the banality of the clothes worn by its characters evoking the urbanity and the exoticism of its fauna evoking the jungle), mixing the registers (hyperrealism or photographic realism and unrealism of the colors), sometimes pushing the incongruity to the abnormality (a smudged face evoking primitive paintings, another, all bluish, the face of a mutant), Bernini’s paintings plunge us into a troubled world where the apparent normality is constantly challenged by anomalies, shifts, disproportions, distortions… A disruptive world, illusory, fantasized, which, like a house of cards, seems in danger of collapsing at any time, of disappearing and dissolving into the glittering dust of dreams… In the same way, his backgrounds, pure abstractions, seem to dissolve in their shimmering and luminous coulures, plunging us into the indetermination…
« Them and Us » – Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève
7 Rue Pastourelle, 75003, Paris
Du 4 Septembre au 8 Octobre
https://www.suzanne-
STÉPHANIE DULOUT