Le Voyage à Nantes and Semitan (Nantes’ transportation network) have once again joined forces – this time to invite artist Amélie Bertrand to take over two trams and create mobile paintings that hurdle through the urban landscape.
Amélie Bertrand’s paintings can be described as lavish and colorful, filled with otherworldly landscapes that are hermetically sealed off from any sense of horizon or perspective.
She works with a repertoire of shapes which she forages from the world. Some of her more common motifs are grids, stones, bricks, paving stones, fences, chains, quilting points, foliage, palms, and vines, to name a few.
She then composes a world of shapes and colours taken from a fantasized, virtual realm – images that are sterile and artificial, devoid of any human presence, thus making it impossible for spectators to lose themselves in them.
Seeing the trams as two objects that cut through the cityscape, Amélie Bertrand digitally composed a décor from the repertoire of shapes and memories she built during her visit to Nantes.
Camouflaging the trams by covering them in images of rocks and paving stones, Amélie Bertrand has composed two synthetic landscapes that will surge forth like mirages through the neighbourhoods they visit.
Amélie Bertrand was born in 1985. She lives and works in Paris. She is represented by Galerie Sémiose (Paris).
Work produced by Semitan.
The two trams will run until 2024.
Trams and buses created for the Voyage à Nantes
Visual artworks.
