Another Place is pleased to present French Riviera, a solo exhibition of paintings by Amélie Bertrand.  Palm trees bend toward iridescent sunsets. Nails, manicured to perfection, pierce a neon haze. Everything is impossibly sleek; a never ending vacation. This is Amélie Bertrand’s sublime, in which the south of France could be California, in which the global aesthetics of beachside resorts are suspended in vapor.

Subjects are weightless in Bertrand’s work, placed in paintings as if by a mouse click rather than an artist's hand. This quality carries over from Bertrand’s process, which begins with digital rendering before they become meticulously realized in oil paint. Beneath layers of floating forms, a sense of unease lurks. Piles of spheres are suspended in cool water, crisscrossed with the silhouette of ferns and tree branches. The work is impeccably smooth, and in so, Bertrand reveals harshness: the obsessive push to achieve perfection. Lily pads glide into  the sunset, cut off by chain link fence, perpetually out of reach. Bertrand’s register is haunting and gorgeous, a gradient of control and desire. Bertrand’s works evoke the impossible, and yet most wanted: perpetual motion, a state of being in which there is no scarcity, only radiant opulence. Bertrand travels to the extreme, documenting a world somewhere between dream and nightmare. 

Amélie Bertrand (b. 1985) is a Paris based painter. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille. Her work has been featured in artforum and in several solo exhibitions at Semiose gallery in Paris. This is her first exhibition with Another Place.