Umbrella - Lego

A woman standing on a bank, a green parasol, a child in a straw hat, a sky swept by wind. We recognize The Promenade, the Woman with a Parasol painted by Claude Monet in 1875, one of the most famous images of Impressionism. Brick Board Builder does not reconstruct it: it leaves it in place and builds on top of it.

The bricks take over three elements. First, the parasol, built in dark greens and grays, thick and casting a very real shadow over the painting. Then the clouds: clusters of aqua green, lavender, pale pink, and sky blue floating across the sky and spilling onto the dress. Finally, the grass at the very bottom, dense and bushy, in olive, anise green, sand, and gray. Between these masses, the painting remains visible: the woman’s veiled face, the child’s silhouette, patches of sky. What has not been built was chosen with as much care as the rest, and the two faces are left to Monet.

The idea is more fitting than it may seem. The Impressionist brushstroke consists of patches of color placed side by side, which the eye blends from a distance. The brick does exactly the same thing. A century and a half apart, the painter and the builder share the same principle: from afar, an image; up close, a material. Here, quite simply, the material comes out of the painting.

Up close, fantasy takes over again. Small white clouds made from molded pieces mingle with the real ones. A pale blue dolphin swims in the middle of the sky. Ladders connect the clouds to one another, a chain hangs in the grass, and an anise-green spring coils around the foot of the bank. Details that have no place in a Monet, yet settle into it without disturbing it.

Monet painted quickly, outdoors, to capture a moment. Brick Board Builder builds slowly, by hand, without a predefined plan, using reused LEGO® bricks that arrived loose from all over France, notably through the nonprofit Rejoué, and were then cleaned and sorted one by one. The result can never be recreated identically.

A unique, numbered piece bearing the artist’s plaque, presented in its white frame and delivered with its certificate of authenticity.