During her time at art school, she would most often be found bunking off drawing lessons to spend her time cropping out mini-golf sculptures using Photoshop, with her worst marks for perspective pinned on her studio wall. Her "Grand Tour" took her to run-down seaside holiday resorts, from a rusty Lunapark to a crumbling Aqualand, along fitness trails populated with ex-Craven A smokers trying their hands at a few push-ups. These shapes, extracted from the splendours of their provincial architecture are reconstructed on her canvases, where they inter-link, connect with each other and overlap in pure formal interplay, occasionally becoming embroiled in a surgical brawl without ever resorting to drama or over-ornamentation. In truth, Amélie Bertrand's art despises this type of affectation as much as it does "the more tiresome aspects of painting": her colours don't develop gradually, they are applied in flat layers and she is at her happiest when her palette resembles an RGB colour chart.  What the spectator might take for an obsession with the travesty of medieval architecture of the kind to be found in local garden centres, or the glassy-eyed environment of platform video games, is simply a solution to a problem in her painting, where there is a question of importing contrasts in colour, shadows and "bizarre" perspectives to see if it all still works. You might also be inclined to make use of your scanty knowledge of psychoanalysis to evaluate the recurring symbols of anxiety depicted - tombstones, trap-doors in the flooring, anti-pigeon spikes or the King-size imitation leather divan - or the perfect harmony between symbols of war and of entertainment, bathed in bright Californian light. And then again, if you were to ask her about her "thing" for palm trees, Amélie Bertrand would simply reply, "drawing bushes is a pain".

These paintings don't tell stories, they don't symbolise anything but their sheer presence is terrifying - for the precise reason that any attempt to penetrate their inner being leads back to their surface, after having lured the spectator's eye into a particularly tight corner or entrapping it in the depths of an arbour by merely employing the perverse strategies of showmanship. Even more worrying is the manner in which fiction is created by paring down the real or the way we seem to stumble upon simulated reality surrounded by fencing with the result that this feeling of open-air claustrophobia leaves an aftertaste of déjà-vu. And not far from here, the yacht from the Truman Show collides with a horizon made of cardboard.

Julie Portier