AMÉLIE BERTRA
Name: Amélie Bertrand
Age: 37
Birthplace: Cannes, France
Home: Paris, France
Discipline: Painting
The Swamp Invaders, 2021, photo by A. Mole, courtesy of Semiose, Paris
What’s usually the starting point of your practice, and when does your work feel complete?
My work is about manipulating images, settings and canvas. I like to play with reality through lures. I work a lot with Photoshop in order to create spaces with a special atmosphere, a strange aftertaste of déjà vu. Everything can be a starting point: daily life observations, landscapes, technology. When the idea and the feeling of painting come to me, I start working. The compositions first evolve on my computer screen for a while. Then, I redraw them on canvas. The painting is finished when the sensations that started it fade away.
What are you obsessed with?
Being in my studio and making the painting I am devoted to. I always look at how the painting is looking on canvas. I use a whole hierarchy of shapes in the composition to create a single painted layer as opposed to the accumulation of layers I make in Photoshop. I want the vision not to be hindered by any eect of the paint. The !nal image must be cold, tense and synthetic. That's why I work with tracing paper and stencils.
How do the different collaborations you make influence your practice and technique?
Collaborations push my practice further. They challenge me and open me up to different high-level skills, new dialogues on creation, and new constraints. Each collaboration had an impact on my practice, either by bringing a dierent apprehension of the space, or the desire to use new tools and mediums.
What are the interactions that you seek between your work and the viewer?
Everyone has their own experience of a painting. Nevertheless, I like when the viewer is held on the surface of the painting, trapped in an angle by an inextricable visual effect. The compositions of my paintings allow many different approaches. Their figurative elements can evoke a story to the viewer, but these narratives are never strong enough to make us forget we are looking at a painting.
What is your commitment, both artistically and personally?
Think about what surrounds us by using painting tools and propose to the viewers contemporary spaces that question the world we live in. The transitions between the real world and the virtual ones are really important in my work and echo the way digital reality shapes our relationship with the world.
Where is the beauty for you today?
In the images reported by the James Webb Telescope, “NASA’s most precise eye!” They appear as new images never observed before, yet existing in our universe, in the infinite cosmic ocean. This idea is so strange and abstract to the mind that it opens huge possibilities. At the same time, these images seem incredibly familiar to us. We have digested them through our culture, science fiction films, video games... They seem so synthetic because they are falsely colored and recomposed from thousands of distinct image files. Thousands of images in an incomprehensible space-time to finally create a single image – this is very beautiful. Looking at them, we look for a reality that is unknown to us. I think you can often look at art in this way too.