Volery Gallery is proud to present When the Eternal Breaks Through, a solo exhibition by Cindy Bernhard, opening on Thursday, 20 November 2025, and on view until Tuesday, 16 December 2025, in Dubai. Known for her luminous, cinematic paintings that merge devotion and digital glow, Bernhard expands the boundaries of contemporary figuration, transforming light itself into both subject and atmosphere.
In this new body of work, Bernhard continues her exploration of surface as revelation, where paint radiates, refracts, and breathes. Each canvas becomes a threshold between the sacred and the screen, where baroque intensity meets the language of our hyper-mediated age.
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When the Eternal Breaks Through, by Morgan Meis (abbreviated)
Bernhard is one of those painters for whom surface is both subject and stage. The surface, in her work, is not neutral ground; it’s alive. It glows, refracts, glimmers, and occasionally seems to breathe. The light in her canvases is a paint-born phenomenon; it doesn’t fall on the painting so much as emanate from it. In this, she’s closer to Helen Frankenthaler than to Richter, though her edge is sharper and her tone more cinematic. Frankenthaler once said, “The paint itself becomes the light, the atmosphere.” That could easily serve as an epigraph for Bernhard’s recent work, though with the caveat that the atmosphere here has weather: clouds, storms, water pressure, cosmic showers of phosphorescent rain.
Bernhard’s world borrows freely from the language of religious art. The framed, haloed faces; the liquid ecstasies; the flood of illumination breaking through the dark. This is religious painting reimagined through the glow of a screen. These paintings channel the devotional impulse without explicit doctrine. They feel like altarpieces for a secular age, where transcendence comes in the form of good lighting and perfect gradients. You could say they’re paintings of faith, with all the tension that the “of” here implies.
The gold frame seems to hover between kitsch and reverence, and that’s exactly the tension where the work lives. This is a world that takes the baroque’s obsession with spectacle and turns it inside out. Spectacle now becomes sincerity. The miracle is aesthetic: the paint performs transubstantiation. The paintings would look utterly at home on Instagram, and that’s part of the point. Bernhard understands that the spiritual arena of our time is the feed: a space of icons, radiant color fields, slow hypnotic motion. Her work meets that arena on its own terms, and yet exceeds it. On a screen these images might first register as digital, airbrushed, almost too smooth. In person, the craft asserts itself, the slight resistance of brushwork, the drag of the medium. You feel the body behind the glow.
The humor is important. Without it, the religiosity might fall flat. Bernhard’s paintings flirt with revelation, but they keep a wink in reserve. There’s something profoundly human in that mixture, awe and laughter, faith and camp. She knows that the divine can only survive if it also knows how to perform on the internet. What makes this humor work is her unrelenting precision. Every whisker, every droplet, every refracted line of rain, all executed with devotion. And that’s not the wrong word. Painting like this requires the devotional temperament. Each stroke is an act of worship, or at least of serious regard. She paints like someone who believes there’s still something in the world worth perfecting, even if only for a moment.
If Bernhard’s work is religious, it’s because it believes in the power of the visible. These paintings insist that light itself, made, faked, built up in layers of pigment, can still be an instrument of grace. The radiance is not metaphorical; it’s optical, real, there in the way paint interacts with our eyes and our brains. It’s religious spirituality for the digital age, slippery, pixelated, and impossible to pin down. That’s also what gives the paintings their strange purity amid the excess. Everything is slick, luminous, overripe, and yet nothing feels cynical. They operate in that narrow, nearly miraculous space where camp and sincerity touch fingertips. The same place, incidentally, where genuine faith lives.
Bernhard’s genius is to know that in painting, as in religion or spirituality of any kind, the trick is not to prove anything but to make you believe for a moment. To make you feel, standing before the image, that light and surface and color might, just this once, be enough.
Exhibition Dates:
November 20 - December 16, 2025
For inquiries and to register interest on the Preview List please email info@volerygallery.com