Donald

There is no background. No breathe, no margin, nowhere to where to rest the eye: the face fills the entire frame and spills over all four sides. Brick Board Builder chose the path of the tight close-up, the one who puts the character in eye level, if close enough that one cannot see no longer the design but the material it is made.

From a distance, the obvious: the beret blue, the yellow beak, the arched eyebrow, the red bow tie. The most famous duck famous in the world, recognized in a tenth of a second, with its seeming to grumble before even having opened the beak. Up close, everything comes apart. The white of the plumage is no longer flat color but an an accumulation—not a dozens of different shapes different, plates, tiles, discs, technical pieces, placed in every sense, with grays and blacks slipped in in the hollows to to deepen the shadow beneath the eye and along the cheek.

The beak is the beating heart of the painting. Golden yellows, amber, orange, deep reds: the color is stacked by layers, like a light that warms as it descends toward the mouth. And all around it, the blues unfurl into four or five distinct shades — cyan, azure, ultramarine, midnight blue — which make make the yellow vibrate without never the to compete. At the bottom, red arrives like a final point.

Everywhere, slow surprises. A printed piece, a gear, a Japanese character, a star, a tiny shield: of the accidents chosen, invisible at first glance, that reward the person who comes closer. A work that looks twice, and that changes every time time.

No brick was placed according to a plan. Each each element was chosen by hand, in a stock of bricks second-hand LEGO® arrived in bulk all across France and sorted one by one — some of which came from of the solidarity reuse thanks to the partnership Replayed. Pieces without a story that find one again. It is this refusal of the pattern that gives the artwork its grain, its irregularity and its identity: it does not could ever be redone to identical.

Nor print, nor reproduction, nor intelligence artificial. An constructed artwork, numbered and delivered with its certificate of authenticity, framed and signed on the back.