Amélie Bertrand: Country Life
Semiose, Paris, FR
Semiose presents Country Life, a solo exhibition by Amélie Bertrand, on view from March 22 to May 10, 2025, at 44, rue Quincampoix, Paris. The exhibition introduces a new body of work that continues Bertrand’s exploration of artificial landscapes, ambient atmospheres, and digital aesthetics while adding new motifs, such as the cattail or bulrush, to her visual vocabulary—composed of saturated color fields, repetitive digital motifs, enigmatic environments, artificial flowers, neon lemons, ornamental chains, and stylized water lilies. Bertrand captures the Zeitgeist between digital fabrication and speculative nostalgia.
Drawing on influences as wide-ranging as Claude Monet, Dan Flavin, Andy Warhol, and electronic music visual culture, Bertrand composes her works digitally using the already obsolete software Photoshop CS3, a program she began experimenting with in the 1990s. This deliberate adherence to an outdated tool underscores a generational attachment to early digital aesthetics. The motifs in her paintings—luminous pools, ponds, fenced structures, and vacant architectural remnants—are rendered with precision and repetition, suggesting a visual experience akin to ambient music. Bertrand’s works are conceived not primarily as narrative or representational objects but as environments charged with atmosphere, meant to evoke a mood or induce a sensory state.
In Country Life, Bertrand deepens her engagement with these constructed environments. The cattails, rendered with palpable texture and artificial sheen, resemble tactile objects—referencing both natural flora and fabricated décor. This haptic dimension recalls the “blps” of Richard Artschwager, which redirected viewers’ attention to their surroundings. Her cattails function similarly: not as naturalistic depictions but as visual markers anchoring the viewer in a suspended space. This spatial ambiguity is further emphasized by the backdrop of liminal architecture: brick ruins, concrete remnants, and empty interiors that evoke the eeriness of digital “Backrooms” or generic hotel corridors.
The exhibition’s title, Country Life, nods obliquely to Georges Clemenceau’s 1896 letter to Claude Monet inviting the artist to travel with him to Greece. This historical anecdote serves as a thematic thread, reimagining such a journey through a contemporary lens of digital remakes and speculative nostalgia. Bertrand’s re-envisioned scenes seem to transpose this fictional voyage into a parallel universe of nightclubs, liminal playgrounds, and vapor-lit poolsides. As in Monet’s vision for the Water Lilies—once imagined as décor for a salon—Bertrand’s paintings propose environments in which aesthetic pleasure, ambient atmosphere, and artificial nature converge.
For more information, please consult Semiose’s website here.
Last Updated on March 26, 2025
About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
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