A child of concrete art and geometric abstraction, Ode Bertrand first pursued a career as a ballet dancer, before taking up painting with Aurélie Nemours, becoming her assistant and pupil. By her side, she developed a highly personal style, choosing to express herself through the purity of line, which she articulates and modulates ad infinitum using oblique, horizontal or vertical grids that she superimposes, sometimes shifting them, thus revealing the power of combinatorics. Supported or imperceptible, thin or in narrow strips, the lines respond to each other, dance, float and take on rhythm as the creations unfold. Their confrontation gives rise to a multitude of relationships that break down their isolation and finitude.

While Ode had always confined her creativity to the pictorial field, the line now redraws itself differently under her fingers, composing new poems. In her most recent work, the new "Flou Fil" series, she deepens her exploration of line, taking it into a third dimension. She replaces the pictorial with the "plastic", stretching black or white cotton threads across the canvas. The idea was born in the artist's mind from a series of miniatures in which the weaving of lines, particularly dense and powerful, provokes new reflections. The approach remains meticulous and precise, always built around a delicate balance between line, light and rhythm, which combine in different ways. The canvases are constructed, arranged and thought out with precision from these black-on-white or white-on-black threads that energize the space on which they are received with great emotion. There's no paint here; the pictorial element comes from the light, which strikes the canvas differently depending on the inclination of the thread. "It's the light that makes the painting, that reveals it", explains this grand dame of geometric art with enthusiasm. The essential is said, as in a haiku, an evocation that invites us to a different way of looking, a different reading imbued with serenity.

Simultaneously, the EAC (Espace de l'Art Concret) presents the works of Ode Bertrand and Cécile Bart, as two major artists of the French abstract scene. Not only with each other but in a dialogue with a selection of works from the Albers-Honegger Donation.

Elisabeth Martin, Art historian