Conversation

1938, oil painting on canvas, 150 x 100 cm
Coll. Gaston Bertrand Foundation
N ° inv. 33

During his animist period, Gaston Bertrand mainly focused on two themes: couples seen from the back and anonymous crowds, which are also frequently seen from the back as if the artist wanted to remain as an unnoticed and discreet observer.
In the late 1930s and during the war, Gaston Bertrand very frequently depicted human figures in parks or street scenes. With the aim of simplifying the shapes and colours, he expressed his ambition to avoid the easy route of comfortable conventions. This approach clearly appears in the drawings and paintings that Bertrand started to produce in 1937 and which were inspired by strange gatherings of small men under the foliage of a park, in some anonymous corridors or on the tramway platform. A contradictory and somewhat agonizing silence falls on the protagonists, characterized by the dark and shaded colours used by Gaston Bertrand at the beginning of his career. The young Bertrand found his way in a very personal form of ascetic and sharp Expressionism in which perspectives and contours are virtually erased. If we had to find some previous examples of these nonchalant warpages, of the unexpected layout and peculiar disengagement of Bertrand’s anxiously ironic graphic expression, we would probably refer to James Ensor. However, in Bertrand’s work, irony is only glimpsed and it encourages dreamy melancholia.