Antoine Bernhart

Do not kill, do not hurt, do not violate your neighbor – in other words, do no harm to anyone – are some of the prohibitions on which the social contract is founded. Education sets out to make them understood and accepted. Law enforcement and the judiciary strive to ensure people abide by them. Describing or depicting murders, assaults and sexual violence escapes prohibition, however, in the name of freedom of expression. While it is clearly necessary to avoid unsettling children or people who are nervous of excessive representations by exhibiting them in public, a depiction of murder does not kill, a description of rape does not rape, and so on. These representations can cause painful emotions and affront consciences. All adults are free to reject images that unsettle them. Just as all adults are free to appreciate them as long as they are artifacts, not imprints (film or photo). A photograph of a scene of pedophilia is an act of complicity with a crime. A drawing or description of a similar scene can be a work of art. This is the paradox of representation.

Night is the backdrop of the work of Antoine Bernhart: the night of jail cells, the night of thick forests, the night conducive to monsters that dawn dissolves. The artist chooses this dark décor for the scenes of rape and violence that he has not stopped drawing for decades. A vast garden of torment, where childlike figures in grinning masks torment victims who seem to reach a peak of ecstasy, like the Chinese torture victim described by Georges Bataille in Les Larmes d’Eros. For this truly is a narrative of evil and an experience of boundaries where erotic excess is on first-name terms with death. Antoine Bernhart’s work is in the long tradition that links Sade to Bellmer. The hallucinatory power of his characters, the fascinating cruelty of his sexual theatre make this artist a radical exception in the field of contemporary drawing.

With the support of Trentotto and Satys group, and in partnership with les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse.