Lucile Bertrand

Born in 1960 in France, Lucile Bertrand lives and works between Paris, France, and Brussels, Belgium, since 2001, after having lived for six years in New York. She exhibits regularly in Europe, the US and Asia. Her work focuses on issues related to the violence of wars and their consequences, migration and inequality in border access, as well as the exploitation of the planet and all living beings. Her creations are characterized by pure lines and an economy of means that nonetheless conceal considerable semantic depth. From everyday tragedies to large-scale catastrophes, her visual metaphors bring forward a subtle and nuanced picture of political and human crises. Lucile Bertrand claims to work slowly. She likes to spend long periods of time in her studio to mature her research, which is often nourished by literature, sociology and philosophy, as much as she likes to work in situ from the history of places or with people who share their life stories with her — which also requires time and a personal commitment. Between cartographies and landscapes, her drawings are also portraits in depth: they restore the stories of singular people through which the artist approaches vast and pluralistic issues. Her drawings, as well as some of her work on photographs, imply a reading in the truest sense of the term as many of them contain some text, resulting from her research of her encounters. However, she strives to keep only what is sufficient to describe a situation or to question its meaning. Factual and devoid of adjectives, the text keeps pathos at bay. If there is emotion, it is in what will emerge from the reading of the text and its understanding. The artist often proceeds by thematic series and, in spite of the recurrence of her concerns, her work takes various forms — works on paper, sculptures, videos, large-scale site-specific installations, sound installations — and she uses a large range of techniques.