Exhibition Amélie Bertrand. Neon Club

Through a painting practice defined by a flawlessly smooth finish, Amélie Bertrand (b. 1985) departs from idealized landscapes inspired by nature to construct settings suspended between dream and nightmare. Her compositions are meticulously built from interlocking planes and surfaces that give way to skewed perspectives and depthless horizons. Colors are applied in gradients, always in a single layer, as if suspended on the surface of an impenetrable screen. Within the strict confines of painting, Bertrand creates an atmosphere of déjà vu—a distinctly contemporary climate that is at once psychological and physical. Somewhere between Giotto and West Coast art, she combines the weight of tradition with a synthetic psychedelia, flattening the visual culture of the present into carefully calibrated fields of color and form.

Opening at the Musée de Valence in October 2026, Neon Club brings together approximately thirty works, the majority of them previously unseen and created specifically for the exhibition. The project reveals new directions in Bertrand’s practice and introduces new motifs, including curtains and storefront windows, which expand her established vocabulary of objects and architectural forms. Like the swimming-pool paintings also featured in the exhibition, these new canvases depict liminal or hidden spaces that are as alluring as they are ambiguous.