Bertrand Lavier

Bertrand Lavier

(Châtillon-sur-Seine, Francia, 1949)

The relationship between reality and the tools of its representation (from verbal communication to visual art) drives Bertrand Lavier’s research. His art destabilizes, it employs materials that belong to the artistic sphere and everyday life, and questions the criteria that separate them.

Since the 1980s, Lavier has been covering ordinary objects with dense brushstrokes, using for his painting the same colors that characterize the chosen object.

Steinway & Sons, 1987, belongs to this series. It is a work made using a real grand piano, produced by the homonymous factory. Deprived of its functionality as a musical instrument, the piano is covered with broad, precise brushstrokes of dense acrylic color. These brushstrokes refer to the painterly gesture, particularly to a certain type of modern painting, from Van Gogh to the gestural painting of neo-Expressionism.

At the same time, the use of paint as a varnish that accurately covers the object, in this case the piano, eliminates graveness and personality from it.