Bertrand Lavier has long made a career out of framing both the extraordinary and the mundane with equal artistic reverence.
His knack for manipulating reality, sometimes without intervening at all, is astounding, bewildering, ingenious and hilarious – all dependant on where you’re standing. What Lavier calls his “demonstrations” are less acts of making than acts of staging. His art seeks to expose our intellectual baggage and disrupt our most entrenched visual habits.
Photo Credit: Thomas Merle
Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
On of his favourite tricks is to coat everyday objects in what he describes as “typical Van Gogh brushwork”. A refrigerator, a safe, a piano: each becomes both sculpture and painting whilst retaining its unremarkable “objecthood”. It is a Duchampian rejection art that merely pleases the eye in favour of work that exercises an audience’s perception.
At Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Morceaux Choisis (French for “selected pieces”) showcases an array of Lavier works. The show opens with a literal and metaphorical bang. At the far end of the gallery sits the wreckage of a Fiat 500. Once the plucky emblem of post-war Italian optimism and still the star of rolling Tuscan hills, first drives for seventeen year olds, and impeccably stylish A-to-B mobility; it now appears crushed and compacted. But its body is repainted in a glossy, seductive red.
Not just any red though: Lamborghini red.
Unlike Warhol’s silkscreened car crashes or Charles Ray’s fabrications, Lavier doesn’t orchestrate his cars’ destruction. He selects an already wrecked vehicle and presents it as a fait accompli. This piece quite literally smashes the barrier between contrived sculpture and reality. The violence of it, the noise and the beauty – the fact that these painful transformations, while destructive at the time, give way to a truer state of being. Now, I’m not saying we ought to aspire to be a wrecked Fiat 500, but scratches and dents are testament to a life well lived, and are rightfully lacquered in Lamborghini red.
Upstairs, a there is a new series titled Inclusions. Anonymous abstract canvases sourced from flea markets and junk shops are encased in blocks of acrylic resin. The gesture recalls the Nouveau Réalistes – Arman’s accumulations in particular. In this instance Lavier doesn’t even paint, he simply reframes and entombs.
Photo Credit: Thomas Merle
Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Encapsulation creates another perceptual short circuit. The works hover between painting and sculpture, discarded and elevated, protected and suffocated. Arranged as what Lavier calls an “abstract bouquet,” the seven pieces resemble a group show within the show. We get to see both the front and the back of these pieces, with the reverse at times more compelling than the front.
Brushstrokes, the exhibition’s second new body of work, makes that flip literal. Fabricated in painted steel, these wall-mounted forms translate gestural marks into three-dimensional objects. Where Roy Lichtenstein once depicted the brushstroke as comic-strip sign, Lavier gives it weight and shadow. Mounted like paintings yet protruding from the wall, these works sit in an ambiguous zone between relief and canvas; American Pop’s cool detachment and Europe’s insistence on the reality of things.
Photo credit: Thomas Merle
Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Next up are his paintings. A blanked-out Parisian shop window is gloriously rendered in Vitrine. In Bleu de Cobalt (2025), a painted Fujichrome, Lavier overlays tone-on-tone brushwork onto a photographic print of a blue surface, inserting subjectivity into a medium associated with mechanical objectivity. And in Bleu de France par Tollens et Ripolin (2025), juxtaposed industrial paints assert colour as matter rather than prospective metaphor.
Across Morceaux Choisis, Lavier returns us to first principles: What is an object? When does a thing become an artwork? Is a sculpture made, or can it simply be found, renamed, reframed, re-seen? His answers are never didactic. Instead, they are staged as propositions, wry and rigorous. In Lavier’s world, reality is not denied but gently tilted, just enough to reveal how unstable and exhilarating our habits of perception can be. In doing so, and with his tongue never far from his cheek, the plain absurdity of it all hits like a car crash.
