Echoes of Impermanence
Favoring painting, Clément Bedel creates hybrid compositions that capture suspended moments between collapse and rebirth. His vibrant, incisive works, evoke a world in mutation where the resilience of nature defies the idea of extinction. Intense streams of color, symbolizing pollution, merge with plants, trees and brutalist relics in perpetual transformation.
Filamentous fungi, algae and cyanobacteria colonize these ghostly landscapes, reinterpreting human ruins as new ecosystems. These multi-metabolic landscapes disrupt our traditional perception of time as linear, and are in line with Timothy Morton's theorization of hyperobjects, entities with temporal and spatial dimensions so vast that they defy our usual conceptions. By crossing the notions of aposematism and Batesian mimicry, Bedel's work outlines a playful and spiritual evolution. It invites us to rethink our relationship with non-human beings, transmitting visions of a future born of past fractures.
Clément Bedel (b. 1993) is a French painter based in Vienna, Austria. He graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Nancy in 2017, he continued his training at the Fakultet Likovnih Umetnosti in Belgrade, where he lives and works from 2016 to 2020. Originally from the Les Vosges region in France, he developed a deep attachment to nature, reasoning with German Romanticism and the idea of Weltschmerz. His stay in Serbiabroadened influenced his perspective, fueling his interest in the aesthetics and essence of Brutalist architecture.
Clément Bedel has taken part in numerous group shows in France, Germany and Serbia, as well as artist residencies in Leipzig (2019) and Istanbul (2020). He has presented exhibitions at U10 ArtSpace, Belgrade (2021), Centre Culturel de Serbie in Paris (2022), Galerie Hestia, Belgrade (2023), and Eisenwerk Frauenfeld, Switzerland (2023).
Vernastalter: Clément Bedel