Known for layering gradients, colour, and shadow that play with trompe l’oeil effects, Amélie Bertrand toys with the idea of decoration, light, artificiality, and nature to create landscapes that appear as both dreams and nightmares. Her visual language is built around construction patterns and floral arrangements, creating an urban camouflage that references both the Californian idyll and her teenage years on the French Riviera.
Bertrand’s recent oil paintings and digital prints, depict Miami Deco-style architectures in ersatz tropical settings. Works in both mediums feature colorful compositions of stone fountains and porticos, palm trees, ferns, and fruit bowls lit by pink and yellow florescent bulbs to evoke the addictive glow and sleek surfaces of computer monitors and smartphone screens.
Using small brushes and hundreds of hand-cut stencils, Bertrand creates an immaculately flat layer of paint across the canvas. Like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, her painted forms abut perfectly, with no overlap. A certain precariousness underlies this flawless finish, and Bertrand’s paintings sometimes seem as though they might shatter and fall apart, like low-res JPEG or GIF files that dissolve into pixels at close range.
Beneath their slick veneer, Bertrand’s painted worlds are rife with mind-bending illusions of transparency, volume, and space against background painted in sunset shades of blue, pink, orange, and yellow. Though her paint application is utterly even, Bertrand depicts scenes that seem to have more than just three dimensions, consistently turning the understanding of materiality and perspective upside down and inside out. Her blatantly paradoxical representations of distance and materiality ensure that her virtual realms remain superficially delectable but intellectually impenetrable.
Evoking the cyber sphere, painted scenes appear luminous, crisp, and enticing. Though her practice is intimately linked to digital tools and virtual reality, it is through the work of the hand that she captures the conflicts that characterize our increasingly screen-mediated lives. Bertrand’s paintings represent the freedom and claustrophobia associated with screens, the paradoxical sense of connectedness and alienation we feel when we use them, and the ways in which they’ve changed our understanding of reality.