PARIS.- Bertrand Lavier likes to confront us with unqualifiable situations. His artworks often seem to hover between different possible identities as well as different temporalities.
This is again the case with his two new ‘worksites’, as he likes to call these bodies of work that he’s never entirely finished with, returning to them over the decades whenever he feels like it. One of these ‘worksites’ consists of paintings encased in blocks of clear resin, the other a car carcass covered in a thoroughly contemporary coat of gleaming paint.

The encased paintings present us with a paradox. To begin with, there is the iconoclastic, almost sacrilegious gesture of making the paintings permanently inaccessible. Then, the nature of the object is changed: exhibited in this way, the paintings lose their two-dimensionality and almost appear like sculptures. And yet, a consequence of this new way of showing the paintings is that they can now be better seen: on the one hand, because we now see sides of them that until now were not visible, and because the brilliance of the resin heightens their visual presence; on the other hand—and this is the most crucial point—because this essentially destructive gesture lifts these artworks out of the anonymity in which they were otherwise doomed to remain forever. These middling artworks belong to their time in the way they encapsulate a certain artistic programme: just as the artists of the nineteenth century painted still-lives, those closer to us have produced lyrical abstractions. Returning to a recurrent theme in his work, Bertrand Lavier questions the status of the author and originality. This removed repurposing is potentially more ‘artistic’ than the initial painterly gesture, which never seems to interrogate the nature of painting itself. There is a distant echo of Duchamp’s Pharmacie here, as well as some of Lavier’s earlier works: in Landscape Painting and Beyond and Nature Morte and Still-Life, he was already ‘augmenting’ rather middling images. It is this middling quality that gives the gesture of encasement its full significance. Another of Lavier’s themes emerges at this point: the relationship between high and low culture. What are we to make of these honest paintings—essentially artistic but worthless—once they have been elevated and emphasised through a process as popular and tacky as that of resin encasing? Like with the Harcourt/Grévin series, this new worksite reveals the utterly relative nature of cultural hierarchies.

Good and bad taste are also set one into the other with the repainted car carcass. A 1955 Simca Aronde—once the most popular car in France—now nothing but a heap of scrap metal, has been given a coat of bright, candy-coloured paint reminiscent of the ultramodern racing cars driving the streets in the capitals of the Gulf countries. Are we looking at a new object—as the shiny tint seems to indicate—or a wreck—as the rust of the bumper bar reminds us we are? Is this a luxury good or a ruin? The Aronde’s nature crackles with these interfering possibilities, just as it stretches between the 50s and our 20s. In this, it is like Lavier’s painted refrigerator, whose 50s curves, made however in 1997 and repainted in 2023 with thick layers of his ‘Van Gogh touch’, scrambles our habitual frameworks.

With these two new ‘worksites’, Bertrand Lavier continues his pursuit of an investigation he first began a long time ago, one equal parts jovial and serious, interrogating a reality that is profoundly paradoxical, always shifting, always ambiguous, and that can never be grasped in a single dimension.




— Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand

Born in 1949 in Châtillon sur Seine, BERTRAND LAVIER lives and works in Paris and Aignay-le-Duc, near Dijon (France).

His work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world: at the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Grand Palais, the Louvre Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, at the musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, the Palais de Tokyo, the Monnaie de Paris, the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection and the Punta della Dogana–Pinault Collection in Venice, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris and the Espace Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, the Château de Versailles, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, the Consortium in Dijon, the Tate Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Villa Sauber in Monaco, the Centre for Fine
Arts in Brussels, at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt am Main, the MAMCO in Geneva, the Kunsthalle in Berne, the Macro Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma and the Villa Medici in Rome, the mumok museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien in Vienna, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA PS1 and the Swiss Institute in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Maison Hermès Dosan Park in Seoul, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Hôtel Le Bristol, Paris, as well as part of the Venice Biennale.

His sculpture Quelque chose de… a tribute to Johnny Hallyday can be seen on the esplanade Johnny Hallyday (8 boulevard de Bercy) in Paris from September 2021.

In 2022, his work is exhibited at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai, followed by a solo show in Chengdu. In 2023, his work Walt Disney Productions is presented at the Chengdu Biennale.