Galerie West

Pluto in Transit
With ‘Soon’ Patrick Bernatchez toys with the conventions of film promotion campaigns through the creation of an ensemble announcing a film still in the making. Inverting the logic of his recent approach, the artist here elevates the visual objects above the film that they reference.
Among these visuals is a series of monochrome TV colour bar posters, a large-scale plexiglas encased Hollywood style film poster featuring a simian in a space suit, and a 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired trailer displayed on a minute screen surface where the colour bars and the space ape reveal their singular shape shifting roles as they transit through a phantasmagoric setting.
Soon is all about such shifts and transits: a shift and transit between the image supports that are teaser posters and the vehicle that is film, between a trailer named Pluton (in honour of the former planet) and a soon-to-be film called 134340 (the current designation of the demoded stellar object), and finally a shift and transit between the concrete elements of a promotional vision and a wobbly future orbit of makings and unmakings where nothing promises to be quite as it first appeared.

Visual artist Patrick Bernatchez (1972, Montreal, Canada) works on different platforms. Starting with painting/drawing in the 90ties, nowadays Bernatchez also uses audio, video and photography. The last couple of months he was working in Basel, Switzerland and he will start a residency in September 2009 at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
Patrick Bernatchez’s videos are being exposed across Europe and New York. His recent shows include: The Cabinet – Italie, curator Grazia de Palma, Artist’s Space The Black Room, New York, commissaire Joseph del Pesco – EXPRMNTL Galerie, Toulouse, France, curator Manon Bara and Ken Weaver, Les rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Prefix – Institute of Contemporary Art, Curator Scott Macleod and in June a solo exhibit at Stedelijk museum’s-Hertogenbosch Curator Elly Stegeman in Hollande with The Chrysalides Trilogy - a chronicle of a predicted perdition in 3 short films.
(Preview film trailers here)