Bertrand Lavier (born 1949 in Châtillon-sur-Seine, France) is a French conceptual artist, painter and sculptor, belonging to the post-readymade era, inspired by the Duchampian legacy and the Nouveau réalisme, the artistic movement created by the art critic Pierre Restany in 1960. Lavier studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Horticulture in Versailles, France in 1968-1971.
Style analysis
Lavier represented France at the 1976 Venice Biennale, French Pavilion in Venice, Italy. He has become known for transforming everyday objects into artwork by playing with their significance, their names and underlying meaning, and reinterpreting art language with his own humor and a unique personal style that uses three essential dimensions in his artwork: a paint touch over objects, a humorous painting language, and a novel approach to sculpture.
First, the paint touch: Lavier provokes the viewer by painting over everyday objects such as mirrors and stop signs in the 1980’s. In some of his larger works he painted over an automobile or a grand piano. Lavier paints over the object either with transparent acrylic paint or with each color of the original object itself, and more precisely with a type of large brushstroke that is characteristic of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. Hence, this particular style has been nicknamed the “Lavier touch” or the “Touche Van Gogh”.
Second, the language: Lavier plays with language in the Foucauldian tradition by disrupting with his work and titles the notions acquired from references in our everyday lives. For example, in Lavier’s work “Rouge-Bordeaux par Novemail et Ripolin (1990),” the side-by-side monochrome panels of “Burgundy” red paint are literally out of the can with identical names, “Rouge-Bordeaux” from two paint makers, Novemail and Ripolin, yet the two burgundy reds are quite different in tones and that provokes the viewers to reflect on who defines the color ‘Bordeaux’ in life and in art. For Bertrand Lavier, “the world does not exist until you have named it.” Another such example, “geranium red” from Docus and Ripolin, two paint brands, was explained by Lavier himself at the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris, France in 2021.
Thirdly, Lavier creates sculpture-objects by the juxtaposition of everyday objects such as a set of pétanque boules on top of a loudspeaker, the sculpture being named “Intégrales / Triangle” (1989) by the brand names respectively of the pétanque game balls and of the loudspeaker used in the artwork. The juxtaposition of the two creates a virtual sound impression from the typical clinking sound of the pétanque boules coming out of the speaker. This artwork is present in the catalog of the Bertrand Lavier retrospective exhibition at the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France in 1991.
Likewise, in his early work, Lavier would set a refrigerator on top of a safe (Brandt / Fichet-Bauche, 1985). The safe becomes a pedestal for the refrigerator, creating the viewer’s impression of a sculpture emanating from the assemblage.
Lavier suggests that, as theorized by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, we live in a world of appearances, a world in which simulation has replaced the real.