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Jean-Pierre Bertrand

Exhibition — Maison Eclusière

Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Playing Dice, 1978
Collection Centre Georges Pompidou/mnam/Paris
Exhibition view, Maison Éclusière, Toulouse, 2005

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

 

Born in 1937 in Paris, he lives there.

 

If one looks beyond its forms (painting, sculpture, drawing, video) and its mediums (water, brightness, reflection, coagulation, cacophony), the profound work of Jean-Pierre Bertrand resembles a kind of ultimate, almost ineffable quest to penetrate "the foundations of appearance". The first step in this is to seek out in the real world "stimuli which engage or activate the machine, empowering the creative function". The perception of the vertigo of time's flow is not just a motif but the very subject of this exhibition.

 

Invited to exhibit in the spaces of the Maison Éclusière (the lockkeepers' house), situated where the Garonne meets the Canal du Midi, Bertrand conceived a collection of original works, a video installation dedicated to the different states of water (calm, disturbed, or flowing, for example). The lock, a place of eddies and turbulence, is seen as a form of passage, a swinging door between the temporality and ambiguity of the fixity of the present.

With the support of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Paris.