Romain Bernini (b. 1979, Paris, France) lives and works in Paris, France. He graduated with a master’s degree from the Sorbonne, Paris, France (2004), where he currently teaches. Bernini is one of the few painters today to embrace colour in such an unbridled and enigmatic way. Inviting us to explore and unmask the human condition, the artist dives and walks in the pictorial space, as in places marked by a history combining utopias and rituals. Placed in the heart of a strangeness inherent to nomadic and natural territories, his characters seem to float or be suspended in these indeterminate places, where only the shadows anchor the figures. Challenging his characters’ identities by masking them, Romain Bernini confronts these bodies with forces that seem to extract them from the world.
His quest, made of multiple errands, deconstructs the clichés of exoticism and primitivism to substitute the notions of borrowing, of rite, of diversity into collages of heterogeneous cultural elements belonging to completely different spatial and temporal registers. Between wandering, shifting and trembling, his paintings are the beginnings of contemporary mythologies between symbols and spiritual worlds.
Bernini’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Chambery, Chambéry, France; Abbaye Saint André – Contemporary Art Center, Corrèze, France; Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea; West Bund Art and Design Shanghai.
