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About the Work
Whimsical, with an exquisite technique and subtle chromatic flourishes, the universe of a Philippe Bertho painting is a metaphysical three-ring circus. Music plays, plates spin, and errant souls ensnared in cardboard boxes are as likely to sail through the Bertho Universe with nimble feats of visual strength.Always a student of the arts as well as an artist, Bertho himself has observed that the techniques he perfected through formal art education in Rheims, France are the tools with which he creates images that appear real but exist only in the disorienting and provocative realism that are utterly his own. Through his art, he creates a visual story that just the viewer can complete using the imagination and sense of humour.
Bertho’s characters seem to emerge from nowhere, and they feed our curiosity to see what might lie on the other side of the artist’s stylishly alluring portals. Bertho’s work offers tantalizing evidence of a vast source of artistic inspiration. From Norman Rockwell to the trompe l’oiel style painters whose canvases “fool the eye” into believing that what is perceived is real. Bertho’s paintings and prints abound with influences from more contemporary sources as well.
“Odile Lemoy” is part of Bertho’s nod to mass production. Odile Lemoy is a German parts company that sells mechanical parts for cars and equipment. Bertho’s addition of a young woman in a wedding dress crouched in a barber’s chair offers a contrast to the ‘dirty’ industry of manufacturing. Barber chairs crop up often in Bertho’s work and likely signify identity – its creation and its maintenance. In this case, the sense of something “under construction” is amplified by the symbolic labor figures and tools in the lower right corner. However, the sense of this ‘identity work’ as something serious is completely undermined by the character’s air of joie de vivre and the SpongeBob doll that she holds out to us like a trophy. “Odile Lemoy” is a 34 x 34 –inch hand-signed archival pigment print on canvas.
About the Artist
Philippe Bertho is classically trained having enrolled in art school in Reims, France in the early 1990s. There, he spent considerable time studying decorative trompe l’oeil painting. Tromp l’oeil (“to fool the eye”) is a technique used by artists to create the illusion of a 3rd dimension on a flat surface. It is obvious from Bertho’s artwork that he fools much more than the eye…he draws one in by the heart and also quite frequently by the funny bone. Despite his ability to perfectly render reproductions of masterworks, Bertho was drawn to the world of fantasy and illusion. As his style developed, he drew inspiration from renowned contemporary trompe-l’oeil artist, Jacques Poirier. In his early work, Bertho exhibited ingenuity by including unusual materials in his paintings. Employing objects that other’s found useless – corrugated iron, rusted metal boxes, old light bulbs – he was fascinated with his ability to bring his art alive by creating dimension – either by the addition of these items directly onto his canvas or later through the technique of trompe l’oeil.
Please utilize the AR experience in a well-lit room.
Scan the room for surface detection.
Artwork will place in your room.
Using your fingers, align the horizontal white line
with your floor.
Double tap the artwork to scale to 100% size
and pinch to move on the screen.
