It’s not easy, nor should it be, to speak of someone who is no longer here to actively disagree with me. Or correct me. Or, more likely, raise an eyebrow at some yawning fallacy I will invariably trip over. Especially someone like Bernhard, an artist and thinker whose silence now conspicuously appropriate. If we are talking about absence, he is quite rightly having the last word. For even in his absenteeism, he has a way of making one feel like something important has just slipped through unnoticed. It could be a small but very particular detail. Or it might be something deeper; a towering conceptual blind spot hiding in plain sight. And of course, I’ll miss it. Again. But that, I suspect, is at least part of his point. The residue of absence is always part of the message.

I'm not going to pretend to offer a cohesive, enlightened overview of Bernhard’s work or his ways of thinking. That would risk precisely the kind of interpretive closure he so persistently warned us against. He actively scorned euphemistic violences hiding in neat conclusions or dressed as insight. Instead, I want to reflect on the poetics of conspicuous absence that remained so defiantly unresolved in his work. These absences curiously materialised as pockets of resistance where meaning refused to settle, and translation collapsed under the weight of dense ambiguities. This is where Bernhard was most at home: reminding us that art performs best when it is neither decoratively seductive nor rationally doctrinal, but rather when it is darkly, critically and playfully ambivalent.

Half-erased, worn down and uncannily faded old image/objects sometimes hold a power to implicitly index historical violence; not by illustrating it, but by illuminating that which—although barely transcending arbitrariness in its partial erasure—still invites those willing to meet the limits of interpretation. In this irresolvable tension we are reminded that honesty about art’s inherent fictions and deficiencies is paradoxically our strength as artists. Like me, Bernhard didn’t believe in resolutions. But he did believe in the value and contemplative pleasures of slow, deliberate looking and the unruly productivities of associative thinking. That strange, oscillating energy that emerges when memory and matter fail to cohere into a stable narrative yet remain inextricably entangled. That curious mutual insufficiency and unstable relation between what is felt and what is formed. This, in our discussions, was never a problem to be solved but rather a space to dwell in. This is why he loved dense continental philosophy and difficult art, and by extension, why he despised the clean precision of analytic philosophical traditions and the slick seductions of smooth visual candy. His late work lived in dark, murky zones between recognition and obliteration, concept and material, presence and the ghosts of low frequency memories and dense historical associations.

What I connected with most in Bernhard during his final years was his unwavering commitment to the value of thinking through art. Not thinking about art, but with and as art. For Bernhard, making was never secondary to thought. It was a form of thought, albeit never clean or easily paraphrased. It was a necessarily strange, sometimes impenetrable mode of thinking. It was visceral, sceptical, and deeply allergic to simplification. If art was to do anything or mean anything, it had to critically and experientially dwell in the gaps and contradictions in theory. The kind of theory he resisted most was the kind that pretends to explain too much. He preferred his philosophy, like his art, to be dense, folded and defiantly convoluted. That is, sufficiently poetically entangled to hold uncertainties in play.

Our conversations near the end were never melancholic in a sentimental sense. Instead, they pulsed with a kind of tragicomic urgency. We talked about art and philosophy, of course, but also about the then-gathering storm clouds of the new democalyptic world order. We joked (half-seriously) about the absurdities of curatorial trend cycles and the cultural Ponzi scheme that is the myth of “emerging artist”, with its seemingly associated lack of interest in slow, difficult, and deeply matured work in a culture obsessed with the performativity of youth, branded virtue signalling, and technofascist disruption masquerading as innovation. Bernhard’s work belonged to no school in the fashionable sense, although it was always steeped in twentieth-century European thought (that time in history that young art students now hilariously refer to as the 1900s). But where some artists schooled in the 1900s clung to theory and philosophy as explanatory crutches, Sachs used it as compost to produce art that was tangled, unpredictable and typically resistant to clean semiotic harvest.

His approach was suspicious of both kitsch and clarity. If his works seemed obscure, it was only because he insisted the world itself is obscure. And because memory, when handled honestly, tends to dissolve rather than resolve. He knew that the past isn’t something behind us but flickering through the present like damaged film. Bernhard's smudges, absences and blurred figures are necessarily obscured and haunted. His works don’t illustrate philosophical ideas but rather perform conditions wound up in their thinking. His image of a desolate South Australian railway station, for example (a ghostly family photograph) did not “depict” the past but rather sought to enact its erasure and return in real time.

When our conversations wandered near the so-called postmodernism of the late 1900s, something which he viewed with a kind of withering tolerance, it would always be as a corrective. He understood that irony, while useful has its limits. Citation alone cannot resurrect what has been crushed under the weight of forgetting. For as history has shown us, unchecked irony and sincerity can both lead to something resembling fascism.  For Bernhard, making art was a process of excavation, not of truths but of sedimentary layers of misremembered histories and misaligned personal and collective narratives. Bernhard knew that to make is at once to destroy and a way to remember.

One of our last debates circled, with a grim kind of warmly uncomfortable hilarity, whether there is any defensible distinction between the material of the brain and the fictionalisations of the mind. And when I cited some half understood neuroscientific tidbit, he invariably rolled his eyes and accused me, as he often did, of succumbing to 'analytic nonsense'. All that we know is that we still don’t know. Be suspicious of anyone that claims to know. Our present moment, although saturated with information, drained of depth and perpetually anxious, isn’t particularly conducive to slow or difficult art. Bernhard knew this. He didn’t care about accessibility. He cared about fidelity to the complexities of life, history and mortality. But in his refusal of simplification, also lay a sometimes-threadbare refusal to completely collapse into despair.

Bernhard’s work could be dark, but even in its most haunted forms it retained a lyrical density and a compositional intelligence that didn’t scream but murmured, hummed and gently insisted. For me, there was always a kernel of hope in his refusal to make things easy. He believed, as I do, in the critical value of ambivalence. Of not-knowing as a productive state. Of refusing both naïve affirmation and performative cynicism. This is not to say he lacked conviction. Far from it. But his convictions were always tempered by a deep mistrust of orthodoxies, including his own. In an age increasingly allergic to ambiguity, that is in itself radical. Today, meanings are often delivered quickly with messages that demand to be performatively actionable. Bernhard’s work insists otherwise. It asks you to dwell. To sit with discomfort. To stay too long somewhere that will never fully reveal its contours. For in this uncertainty is an ethics of provisional care and attention to the ghosts of damaged truths. But Bernhard was also acutely aware of the danger of reducing these ghosts to allegories. Although his procedurally revisited work resisted the neatness of themes, it neverthess offered a consistent kind of haunted density. More a condition and an accompanying disposition than a message. For it is worth being reminded that between contested binaries such as belief and disbelief, presence and absence, lie fuller terrains of human experience.

And so, in honouring Bernhard we are not only remembering a friend, artist and colleague. We are pointing toward an ethos and an enduring set of orientations essential to a world increasingly addicted to affirmations. As a place where meaning need not be announced but rather glimpsed, obliquely, through layers of loss, contradiction and the occasional accidental punchline.