Ode Bertrand
France, 1930.
Works and lives in Paris.
A pupil of the French geometric abstract artist Aurelie Nemours, she opted for geometric abstraction from the outset, without having had a figurative period or tried out other styles before. Her work as a painter also forms part of Art Concret, but with a different premise: like the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, a fervent defender of the communicative power of the line, Bertrand uses the line as a sign and structure to subvert geometric figures defined around the golden ratio, through grids, labyrinths or triangles. The line and the stroke she articulates and modulates ad infinitum on paper or canvas, suggest a rhythm. First in her miniatures on paper in India ink - her favourite - and then in her larger works.
For more than forty years, Ode Bertrand has devoted herself to line art in a radical way, always composing in families, as she prefers to call her series, because for her each work is a character. She has opted primordially for black and white, more docile and immediate than colour, which requires a certain confrontation and complex tensions between pigments. In her rigorous work, for which she always uses a the drawing pen, the strongest contrast between black and white predominates, using colour in its purest form.
The artist creates powerful and poetic works in which space, vibration, light and her own pictorial language emerge, with lines merging into surfaces, and she often has fun breaking up the construction of the works to further intensify the viewer's tension when reading the work.
Ode Bertrand's work is a meticulous weaving, a work of patience, an ant's labour built around a delicate balance between order and disorder. To bring order out of chaos: this is the challenge Ode Bertrand has taken up in his creation, a fine score with an aesthetic that seems simple and rigorous. Perfectly orchestrated, it configures unprecedented spaces.
The artist has enjoyed great success in recent years, and her works are represented in museums all over the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as in Argentina, Japan and Korea.
Group exhibitions at Freijo Gallery:
· 2024 Asins & Bertrand - Geometric Variations