Médicis II

1961, oil painting on canvas, 146 x 97 cm
Private coll., Bruges
N ° inv. 889

Bertrand’s artfully balanced compositions and his ruler or compass-drawn shapes led the art critics to continuously underline his love of architecture. This is certainly what they felt when they discovered, in the post-war years, the various works inspired by architecture. They noted the extraordinary rigour in the construction and organization of shapes and plans, even when the subject was a marine landscape or a human figure.

During the autumn 1953, Gaston Bertrand made a two-month trip to Italy, which was his first important journey and which he himself qualified as “very studious”. He visited the cities of Milan, Florence, Bologna, Siena and Rome. Bertrand discovered the Medicis burial Chapel at the San Lorenzo Church in Florence, which is one of the most striking architectural testimony of Michelangelo’s genius. Unlike most people, the painter was not particularly attracted to the famous statues ornamenting the mausoleum of Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici. Indeed, the two effigies are never represented on his drawings, nor the allegorical nudes surrounding them. However, Bertrand found the way for his expression in the marble alcoves protecting the statues. The Chapel inspired him around fifty drawings, ten watercolours and twenty-six paintings which are among the most important and the largest works that he painted between 1955 and 1978. All of these works find their origin in the structures of the Chapel, which certainly was the major epiphany and source of inspiration during his trip to Italy. Bertrand’s abstract structuration was actually not led by geometric researches or treatises but rather by the architectonic volumes that he could see in real places.