NATHAN BERTET | Le jour est un mélange

For his first solo show at the Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Nathan Bertet is presenting a collection of oil paintings and watercolours, all produced in the artist’s home town of Palaiseau, where he has his studio. Located in the suburbs of Paris, Palaiseau is an inexhaustible source of memories for the artist, who meticulously maps them out in his works.

In a subtle balance between abstraction and figuration, he composes images in his studio that evoke the familiar places, the streets of which he has been wandering since his childhood. Each day unfolds in colour for Nathan Bertet, who works on dozens of canvases simultaneously, which are closely arranged in his studio, keeping every scene within sight. Avenues, parks, housing estates and hills appear as singular perspectives of his home town. Polysemous and untitled, his works are open to interpretation. He paints small formats: voluptuous and harmonious mental images, in an effort to reaffirm memory without photographic support. For him, the almost mechanical perseverance of memory is essential; if it’s hesitant or it wavers, he has to physically return to the place of the memory to confirm his intuition.

Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory^[1] is a key work in understanding the painter’s practice. Within his book, Bergson explores memory and the relationship between the body and the mind, proposing that the past survives in two ways: through both motor mechanisms and independent memories. Nathan Bertet’s work mobilises these two forms of memory: the spontaneous memory of the image, appearing suddenly as a precise moment in time, which he then transposes into his painting; and the mechanical memory, where, through an almost mnemonic effort, he fixes his images in the studio, independently of their source, in an act of voluntary recall. Similar to a darkroom, his studio becomes a place where memory is revealed.

Far removed from a capitalist and “instagrammable” vision of exoticism and a far away land, Nathan Bertet pays homage to Palaiseau, a town steeped in his own intimate memories. He is an artist who loves to return to the places he travels through. He’s always in a hurry to get back to them, a haste accompanied by a joyful desire to experience familiarity at last. Everyday life, an ordinary, unobtrusive backdrop, forms a continuous, shared thread upon which all our past experiences and temporalities settle, until an extraordinary detail emerges, revealing the hidden depths of banality. The artist’s work can be situated within this interstice: Nathan Bertet provides a fresh perspective on the everyday. By untangling himself from the tumult of the present, he is able to summon the past, appreciate that which is useless, and cultivate the luxury of dreams.

The question of time and duration lies at the heart of Nathan Bertet’s radical practice, for whom each canvas is an act of resistance in the face of contemporary immediacy. His method of creation, spanning over two years, defies the imperatives of speed and productivity. He painstakingly superimposes layers of pure pigment, sometimes applying just a few strokes a day, before letting each layer dry, with a deep appreciation of the moments of painting. Inspired by the Venetian masters and American minimalism, Nathan Bertet strikes a delicate balance between representation and expression, between the presence of the object and the force of the gesture.

“Time is this very hesitation”^[2], and it is precisely within this gap that his gesture is situated: Nathan Bertet deliberately lengthens time, drawing out each stage to intensify its depth. He positions himself out of step with time, refusing to intensify the rhythm of his creation. His work obliges one to slow down, affirming that art, far from yielding to the pressures of the market, can be a space where each moment deepens, unfolds, and where slowness becomes a force of revelation.

^[1] Berson Henri, Matter and Memory, Paris, PUF, coll. Quadrige, 2012

^[2] Berson Henri, The Creative Mind, Paris, PUF, coll. Quadrige, 1985

Margaux Knight

Image : Nathan Bertet, Sans Titre (Rousseau), 2024, oil and pigments on canvas, 14 x 18 cm

Vernissage : 23/11/2024 4:00 pm