Place Royale

1946, pencil drawing, 43 x 50 cm
Coll. Gaston Bertrand Foundation

The inspiration coming from architecture reached its peak when Bertrand chose to focus on public constructions: urban perspectives, squares and streets, building sites of the subway, palaces and religious buildings. Excepted for the Paris subway and the Medicis Chapel in Florence, the artist was primarily interested in the outer design of buildings, as if he was trying to access some universal and common dimension, leaving aside the intimacy which characterised his first architectural researches. The drawings that he made in his studio in the 1940s and which represented the Academy Palace and the Place Royale in Brussels highlighted the vanishing point of the pavement and the gate of the park. Bertrand used a distinctive graphic technique that he would from then on favour in many of his works: he erased the impression of depth by flattening the perspective and transforming it into an interplay of diagonal lines. The minimalist geometric representation of the Place Royale, showing a front view of the architectural mass, emphasises the repetitive rhythm of windows and fine arcatures.