Silver Ruins (2013)
MIXED TECHNIQUE
Silver ruins is part of a series of mental landscapes in which Bernier uses reconstructions of cemeteries, bunkers and ruins to refer to the moral decay of the enlightened ideal of progress. Through the use of mirrors and silver, which symbolize the futile or temporary nature of material possessions, he connects with the iconography of the vanitas still life genre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only with Bernier, the silver does not take the form of an opulent table decoration, but of two collapsed bourgeois houses. In this way Bernier unmasks the bourgeois pattern of values as appearances.