Bertrand Lavier
Walt Disney Productions, 2016

Bertrand Lavier

Bertrand Lavier is a great French artist. After brilliantly completing his studies in horticulture, he began to play around with worn and torn objects of everyday life. He raised the question of modern sculpture by stacking a refrigerator on top of an armchair, and a freezer on top of a safe. He recreated the paintings of the American artist Franck Stella using neon and declared: "I am reviving tube painting. With neon tubes!" The stage was set. Bertrand Lavier said: "Painting was born with painters, the bottle rack existed before Marcel Duchamp.” It is easy to understand how ridiculous it is to try and divide the world between those who paint and those who don’t. A genre-busting artist, Lavier exhibited a totally wrecked Alfa Romeo Giulietta on a museum stand, after it had veered off the road and rolled over several times. Ready-made... Ready-made!!!
The new Van Gogh Foundation in Arles had the fine idea of entrusting the design of its front gate to the artist; he painted in large brushstrokes on the majestic entrance to match the Dutch genius’ style. He plays around like no other with the aesthetic codes of contemporary art. Bertrand Lavier asked Studio Harcourt, a real institution in portrait photography for over a century, to photograph a few wax characters borrowed from the Musée Grévin, using their unmatched technique. Humor is laced with derision. Bertrand Lavier likes to cover his tracks, he is always one step ahead, and plays around with the codes of this world. Nothing is off-limits for him, whether it be painting, sculpture, photography or any other medium...he has dabbled with all. This specialist in conceptual trompe-l'oeil has been building an unclassifiable body of work for almost forty years now. His art is based on intelligence and acumen, using banal objects of our daily lives that he turns into pieces of art.