En Route

En Route, on view at the Marfa Book Company May 8th through June 7, 2015, is a group exhibition featuring work by four European artists: Claire Decet, Samuel François, Benoit Platéus and Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. The works on view were made during the previous nine weeks while the artists, traveling together, enacted a self-directed artists residency in Los Angeles, en route, as it were, to Marfa. In this way, En Route formalizes the process of transit; encourages the consideration of temporality and movement in the works of each artist, whether painting, sculpture or collage; and provides a conclusion to their trip, if not their travel. An opening for the exhibition will be held from 5 - 7 pm on Friday, May 8th and is open to the general public.


To be in one place, while being en route to another imbues us with a sense of immediacy that heightens our awareness of the present and may result in new, unforeseeable and, we gamble, memorable insight or accomplishment upon arrival. In such a context, we see ourselves looking back from the future, as it were, considering the present with a different knowledge. It should be added that ambivalence, approval and disapproval are all possible in that glance backward, since we cannot say for certain whether our awareness will pay off. This is the quality of risk that imbues time and place based experiments. It's a risk that, despite the darker aspects of its potential, has the benefit of being consonant with the experience of travel. For this and other reasons, experiments of this sort are difficult to sustain, at least without intermittent periods of inactivity or inebriation. But, as En Route suggests, they might be possible with the addition of multiple participants. This might also, in some instances, improve the chances of individual successes, or may at least diminish the discomfort in the sense of self-awareness that accompanies being en route to a conclusion of one sort or another. This is the spirit of the present exhibition: an openness to novelty, and its attendant risks, combined with the opportunity to share in the gamble. As a consequence, we have a body of work made, if not collaboratively, then together. The works of the artists in En Route also benefit from being dissimilar, however, and the artists have used the experience primarily to further their individual interests and concerns. Individually, the works raise medium-specific questions concerning temporality and movement that, taken together in this context, can be extrapolated to larger considerations of these concepts more generally. 

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet makes paintings which invite the viewer to explore them as though they were a midway point between a map and its place. Or, perhaps it's more accurate to say they enact a search while establishing the terrain. In this way, they can seem definitively en route and essayistic, where the essay is considered in its initial meaning as a kind of exploration. In this sense, they exist to sustain a mode of thinking concerning a place they simultaneously make and remake. As such, the paintings defy conclusion and, although still, can seem to move or even flow among points continuously. Their temporality toggles. They can seem geologic, in that their surfaces sometimes resemble geodes, or momentary, the products of a moment's movement. It is no surprise then, that a recent series of paintings depicts a transformation in which the American flag gradually becomes a fiery red sunset. The iconic, and we might say, "grounded" stability of the flag coexists in the fleeting, ephemeral beauty of the day's end and vice versa.