Steve

No color. No constructed background. For the first time, Brick Board Builder lets the white breathe - and it is this white that carries the artwork. Between the profile and the raised hand, a broad empty space occupies the center of the picture. It is not an absence: it is what gives the gesture its suspension, the gaze its distance, and the silence its depth. A thought in the process of forming, captured just before the words.

From a distance, the portrait is immediately recognizable. The thinning hair, round glasses, gray beard, black turtleneck: the most recognizable silhouette in contemporary technology culture, that of a man who spent his life making complexity fit into simple forms. Up close, the drawing dissolves. The face is nothing more than a stack - off-whites, ivories, pearl grays, anthracites, deep blacks - in which each brick serves as a brushstroke. The glasses emerge from an accumulation of dark pieces; the beard is a weave of grays that changes in density from one row to the next; the turtleneck, meanwhile, is an almost featureless black mass, where the eye finds only a few rare reflections to hold on to.

Black and white is not an impoverishment, but a deliberate constraint. Deprived of color, BBB works only with value: light, shadow, and the transition from one to the other. On a palette reduced to a few dozen shades of bricks, every choice matters twice as much - a gray that is too light, and the cheek flattens; a black in the wrong place, and the gaze gets lost. It is the most demanding exercise in the series.

No brick was placed according to a plan. Each element was chosen by hand from a stock of second-hand LEGO® bricks that arrived loose from all over France and were sorted one by one - some of them sourced through solidarity-based reuse thanks to the Rejoué association. Objects without a history that find one again. There is a particular rightness in seeing the man who reinvented the industrial object reconstructed entirely from second-hand objects.

Neither a print, nor a reproduction, nor artificial intelligence. A constructed, numbered artwork delivered with its certificate of authenticity and signed on the back.