Amélie Bertrand

Born in Cannes in the south of France, Amélie Bertrand has developed a fascination for Mediterranean landscapes from the outset, from which she extracts and alters recognizable elements. Through a lengthy process of image collection, the artist produces a digital sketch, layering up to sixty overlays to achieve an interweaving of shapes and motifs. She paints in oil on canvas and acrylic on paper, with the airbrush, and through cut stencils, to achieve perfectly smooth images, the result of this rigorous complexity of execution. Glitzy signs, citrus fruits, swimming pools, palm trees, and sunsets thus become in her paintings motifs deserted by humans, artificial places, outside of any space-time. The vivid color blocks and the ability to evoke representations of shadow and light, even twilight, in which the rules of perspective can be manipulated, violated, and forced, while still retaining their capacity for illusion and immersion, add to an impression of alienation to the overall atmosphere of these paintings. Arcane Tapestry was created for the exhibition “Arcadia”, fitting into this idea of landscape appropriation by artists, like a place without a country, an imagination belonging to no space, an interstice in the chimera.