Leslie Bertho

Leslie Bertho (b. 1995) lives and works in Paris, where she is studying at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Her work sits at the border between appearance and disappearance, with an interest in the traces left by what no longer exists. This same border runs through the form of the work, between abstraction and figuration. Her painting draws only on imagination and memory, keeping only the blur and the substance of these ghosts. These presences take shape through forms that are often suggested or erased, whether human or belonging to a place, a house, a home.

She uses oil paint in a very liquid way to create hazy, vaporous atmospheres. In a gesture of erasure, she scrapes the material directly with her finger, a cloth, or a knife, which allows her to reveal different layers of paint. In her painting, the gesture expands and then holds back, opening up surfaces where the unconscious can be glimpsed. Charcoal appears in fragments. Its volatile texture and raw blackness allow for an urgent gesture, while reinforcing the idea of erasure. In trying to give shape to these fragments of memory, she seeks to make possible a space where absence can still take on a form, a color, a material.