Museum hosts solo exhibition of Amélie Bertrand
The Valence museum is currently hosting a solo exhibition featuring the work of painter Amélie Bertrand, titled Neon Club. The exhibition showcases her pop-style canvases, characterized by dazzling colors and fluorescent neon hues, which blend elements of the "vaporwave" aesthetic with aspects of Op Art.Exhibition creates immersive visual environment
Visitors entering the museum are immediately greeted by a burst of light and vibrant colors, surrounded by geometric lines and abstract forms that evoke architectural landscapes, shop windows, neon-lit nightclubs, and structured buildings with nested compartments. The exhibition creates a space that is both familiar and dreamlike, filled with chromatic gradients and quasi-modernist perspectives that captivate the viewer's retinas.Exhibition uses pink lighting to shape atmosphere
The exhibition's rooms are lit with a pink filter on the windows, creating an environment that contrasts the depopulated and deserted human world with a world populated by fixed lines and undulating waves in pink, green, and yellow. The experience evokes a sense of both unsettling and welcoming, though it remains unclear whether this world is meant to be inhabited or simply observed.Bertrand describes her work as 'mood painting'
Amélie Bertrand, who was exhibited last year at the Orangerie museum, describes her work as "mood painting," drawing a parallel to Brian Eno's concept of airport music, "as easy to ignore as interesting." The intensity of the colors in her paintings reflects the facticity of things, and Bertrand credits Brian Eno's music for helping her understand her pictorial gesture, which is technically precise and executed in the studio.Exhibition explores themes of abstraction and strangeness
The exhibition, curated by Ingrid Jurzak, features a curated path that presents a form of strangeness that is difficult to define. Although Bertrand tends toward abstraction, she admits she does not fully master it. Critic Marjolaine Lévy notes in the exhibition catalog that Bertrand defends an "impure abstraction, which never completely breaks away from the world of things."Bertrand's work reflects a decomposing consumer world
Her canvases, including works such as Nightwatchers, Freak Waves of Wetlands, and Mastaba, resonate with the "vaporwave" aesthetic, characterized by an iconography that combines obsolete digital interfaces, liminal spaces, photographs of deserted malls, bicolor tile, fragments of ancient sculptures, palm trees, sunsets, neon lights, and fluorescent colors. These works reflect a world in decomposition, highlighting the remnants of consumer society.Exhibition runs until March 21, 2027
The exhibition runs until March 21, 2027, and a monographic catalog titled Neon Club is published by Semiose editions, featuring texts by Marjolaine Lévy and Ingrid Jurzak, with 80 pages and a price of 14 €.
