The artist

Born in Perpignan in 1975. Lives and works in Paris. Visual artist and coder from the Paris Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) and the Grenoble Superior School of Arts, Bertrand Planes is well known to question about the work of art finality. He develops video devices, sets up some complex technical processes on the course of collaborations with CNRS researchers and creates new tools from existing mechanisms that he stacks and handles to re-arrange them. Bertrand Planes became famous as soon as he left the Art school in 2003 thanks to the launching of Emmaüs brand name and by organizing fashion shows-performances, widespread reported in the media. Then in 2005 during the biennial show of contemporary art in Bolivia, he achieved his first stereoscopic device : a virtual illusionist restitution of the sea shore lost during the Pacific war. One of the Bertrand Planes ‘ practices consists in altering the functional and commercial imperative of a series-made object and while maintaining its aesthetic qualities, he keeps it away from its first functions in order to provide it with new ones and sometimes invest it with contradictory senses from their original usage. Hence he created the Life Clock, a clock whose mechanism was slowed down 61320 times so that the hour hand does not perform a dial turn in 12h but in 84 years. In 2006, he started using Bumpit !  a long series of installations based on a practice of spatial locations and pictures projection, becoming one of the precursors of a new device henceforward known as video mapping. In 2011 he crossed Russia by driving from Vladivostok to reach Moscow biennial show. A 13500 km journey during which he improvised installations based on this device, in every gallery and art centers met on his way. Bertrand Planes’ works borrow from the technology and its uses, in order to better point out their causes and social consequences. They get shape in devices often implying a development, a progression and get the point to question the artistic exhibition background by widening its perimeter towards unexpected places such as : the CNRS, the Automobile Show, the Citu laboratory (Paris 8), Emmaüs, le Bon Marché.  Besides he co-writes articles issued in scientific magazines. His last exhibitions have been held in Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Copenhagen, Paris, Singapore, Curitiba (Brazil), Moscow.