Amélie Bertrand

From the early 2010s, the vocabulary of Amélie Bertrand has been made up of motifs - almost signs - that everyone can easily understand: brick walls, fences, chains, swimming pool tiles, taken from answers given online to questions in the form of keywords. She then combined them into “credible spaces” forming strange landscapes, which provoked in the viewer a feeling of mirage often leading to discomfort, exploring the possibilities and contradictions of these artificial images. At the center of this universe, nymphs become shapes, or perhaps the contrary, and the geometric form becomes a water lily, a symbol of proven effectiveness, definitively checked and almost exhausted by the vast series by Claude Monet and the immersive decor of Musée de l’Orangerie.

Redrawn and normalized, the water-lily leaf is at the heart of a contemplation on painting, the composition of the piece, and the search for formal solutions for creating a visual space. “As I started to paint them,” enthused Amélie Bertrand, “I felt that it was the coolest thing I had done in a long time. It was easy, and I was free because the water lily appeared immediately on the painting. (..) The colored areas of the water lily appeared and enabled me to easily place the layers, transparency and shading. Just a formal interplay of paint.”

After a lengthy development on her computer and then in the form of stencils, the artist meticulously painted the motifs in oil according to a single-layer technique that forms perfectly smooth solid colors or masterful shading. She summons colors with unbounded smoothness for light effects intended to be observed rather than explained.