Alva Bernadine likes to provoke and disturb the viewer. His photographs are like visual accidents. He has developed a style influenced by the Surrealist movement. The English artist, born in 1961, is nothing if not eccentric. “I am a one-man subculture,” he likes to say.
This unconventional style is reminiscent of the work of Guy Bourdin. The photographs are finely polished, often lit with highly saturated colors. The models seem abused, made to pose in suggestive, uncomfortable positions in dreamlike settings. The style is imbued with mystery, like a reinvented surrealism.
“My photographs can be very simple and at other times more experimental,” says Bernadine. “In either case, I like to play with bodies, distort them.” The viewer sees not only the beauty, sensuality and elegance, but also the dream, the fantasy, sex, anxiety, and the relationship between the dominated and the dominant. Bernardine is a man with an overflowing imagination, a photographer, graphic designer, filmmaker, a real jack of all trades.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
EXHIBITION
Bernadinism, d’Alva Bernadine
Through December 31st, 2014
NUE Galerie
29, rue Méhul
93500 Pantin
www.alvabernardine.net
http://nuegalerie.com
