Amélie Bertrand, born in Cannes, her works having recently been exhibited at l’Orangerie, envisages her painting from a perspective similar to Monet: a painting is worth seeing, not so much for its subject matter or its composition but rather for the atmosphere it projects. There’s not a single detail, not a square centimeter of her paintings that doesn’t exude a particular ambience. One notices moreover, that from one painting to the next, there is almost a systematic allusion to an aquatic element: a pond, a pool, a marsh… Her painting invites a certain cerebral and physical inclination, a sense of floating.

Amélie Bertrand likes to point out that her practical introduction to art took place at the same time as her first exposure to computers. In the late 1990s, she and her father discovered the infinite possibilities offered by Photoshop of image manipulation. This initial fascination is reflected in the painter’s insistence on only using CS3, an old, obsolete version of Photoshop for her compositions. Thus, the tool she uses for drawing remains resolutely linked to a particular era, associated with the jubilation of her first successful experiments.

By means of her impeccably smooth execution, Amélie Bertrand (born in 1985) is able to distance herself from ideal landscapes inspired by nature, and shape decors that fall somewhere between dreams and nightmares. The planes and surfaces of her works are assembled in a complex and meticulous manner, branching out into skewed perspectives and shallow horizons. All kinds of materials and motifs typical of our era saturate her compositions: OSB, laminates, wire mesh, tiles, fleecing, chains, foliage, camouflage etc. Colors are applied in gradients, yet always as a single layer, as if trapped on the surface of an impenetrable screen. Amélie Bertrand creates an atmosphere of déjà-vu, a contemporary ambience that is both psychological and physical within the confined space of the painting. As the missing link between Giotto and West Coast art, Amélie Bertrand combines the great traditions with synthetic psychedelia, transforming contemporary visual culture into carefully controlled constructs of flat tints.

In 2024, a monographic exhibition of Amélie Bertrand took place at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. She has recently enjoyed solo and group exhibitions at the Centre d’art contemporain de la Matmut-Daniel Havis, Saint-Pierre-de-Varengeville (FR), the Maison des arts, Malakoff (FR), the Centre d’art contemporain de Meymac (FR), the Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf (DE), the Ecole Municipale des Beaux-Arts, Châteauroux and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole (FR). Her oeuvres are included in public and private collections such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, the MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (FR), the CNAP, Paris (FR), the FRAC Limousin, Limoges (FR), Les Abattoirs Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse (FR) and the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne (FR).