Céline Gillain, Jean Baptiste Bernadet

Opening Vitrine on Saturday 23.06.2018

We are proud to host a new project with Eric Croes & Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. + A performance of Céline Gillain at the opening.

NICC presents a window display exhibition entitled Le Quart d’Heure Américain featuring works by painter Jean-Baptiste Bernadet (b. 1978 Paris, lives in New York) and sculptor Eric Croes (b. 1978 La Louvière, lives in Brussels). The show includes a brightly hued suspended canvas by Bernadet that serves as a tableau backdrop for a series of sculptural pieces by Croes. The latter’s anthropomorphic models reference the American desert and take the form of a cowboy hat, cowboy boot, booze jug, and cacti. These models resemble birdhouses, alluding to treehouses and other childhood wonders. Bernadet’s dreamlike landscape connotes the bright, radiant sunset of the old film classic Gone With the Wind (1939), and together both artist’s works come together as a vivid, hallucinatory diorama.

The show’s title considers both the temporal limits and potential of this particular allotment of time. For the duo, this interval takes on various forms that range from the time spent looking at NICC’s window display, to brief meetings the artists scheduled to discuss the project, to broader conceptual or historical implications like the interval allotted at a party to inverse the age old unwritten rule where women might ask the men to dance known as Sadie Hawkins. In this exhibition, fifteen minutes can represent both an eternity and a fleeting, ephemeral moment.

Bernadet and Croes have participated in residencies together in Switzerland and France where they collaborated on numerous projects and have shown their work together in various group exhibitions. For the exhibition’s opening reception, Brussels-based artist Céline Gillain (b. 1979 Liège, lives in Brussels) will present a performance. Taking cues from the exhibition’s themes, Gillain’s performance will resemble a hybrid lecture, combining storytelling, gossip, and in-depth research into bird songs.