Bertrand Lamarche

The Fog factory, 2005-2011
model, vinyl components, aluminum, wood, cardboard, fog machine
220 x 125 x 75 cm
unique

Bertrand Lamarche’s work begins with objects or elements which engage his eye: the railway site at Nancy, the hypnotic states associated with movement, Kate Bush’s voice, meteorological phenomenon, giant hogweeds, holes, sound loops, cinematographic cut-outs of space or vinyl rotations. All these elements are part of the artist’s obsessive laboratory and incessantly transmute into installations, projections, mock-ups and videos. The resulting works propose themselves less as fixed objects, even if they are autonomous, than as occurrences which play and replay the movements, the temporalities and the artifices of the visible.

The artist’s visual devices cut out processes at the same time as they transform them into “things to see”. The urban model of Fog factory (2005-2011) transforms the railway site into a scenario: an intermittent fog, coming from a container hung under the table and spreading over the table top, surrounds the architecture in a climatic disorder. The making of a model displaces the real referent into its fictional distortion, into meteorological extravagances through which this work indicates both its dimension of heterotopia and its affinity with science fiction.

The works of Bertrand Lamarche were shown in several exhibitions including La Galerie (Noisy le Sec), Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Nuit Blanche at the Foundation Pierre Bergé -Yves Saint Laurent (FR), Thread Waxing Space (NY), the Anthology Film Archives (NY), the Biennale de Montreal (CA), museum of Fine art Nantes, Nancy, the modern and contemporary art museum Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), Center for contemporary Création (CCC Tours), FRAC Centre (Orléans), International Center of Art and Landscape in Vassivière...

His works are part of several public collections in France such as The Musée National d’art Moderne - Centre Pompidou Paris, FRAC Ile de France, Les Abattoirs de Toulouse, FRAC Centre, MAC VAL Vitry sur Seine, Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart... and part of some private collection such as Agnes b.

Authors such as Elizabeth Lebovici, Peggy Gale, Marie Ange Brayer, François Piron, Anne Lou Vicente, Gill Gasparina, Michel Metayer, Antonia Birnbaum, Philippe Duboy, Anne Bonin or Pascal Pique have written about his work.

In 2012, he was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and two majors exhibitions at the FRAC Centre (Orléans) and at THE CCC (Tours) were dedicated to his work.