Treat yourself to a Lego painting to decorate your living room? It is possible and it would even be a trend. To speak of Lego is first and foremost to send back to childhood a large part of the adults who have interwoven these colored rectangles to make – with more or less talent – spaceships or fortified castles. But now it’s also referring to an art material like any other, which will be the star of the show for the third time. Lego Mastersbroadcast on M6 this Thursday at 9:10 p.m.
In a few decades, the little bricks have gone from children’s rooms and a few pimply geeks to the biggest art galleries. Because, since always, the popular culture interferes in art, initially with its large clogs before being invited there.
A new spotlight on Lego, participating both in taking the adults who imbricate them out of the cliché of the nerd and in diversifying the target audience of the Danish brand. 20 minutes returns, with an art specialist and “brick artists”, to the evolution of the image of bricks.
“I was not strong in painting or art”
With Lego Masters, it is also the return of the two “brick masters”, present since the first season of the program presented by Éric Antoine. In this role, Georg Schmitt, one of the 14 contractors and builders certified by the brand, teams up with Paulina Aubey, a visual artist from Orleans who swapped her pastels for bricks seven years ago. “I started working with bricks a bit in my corner, I tried to transcribe my practice of pastel drawing with these little squares of color that I use like pixels to make portraits. »
Brick artists, by seizing Lego, also quickly understand the power of this material. Object occupying a place of choice in both popular culture and the childlike soul of adults, their use is generally a source of enthusiasm and curiosity. “Legos are super-powerful, you can do whatever you want with them, but they’re still Legos,” enthuses M’brick. The paintings I make always have a lot of impact because I mobilize hundreds of pieces. People recognize the elements they held in their hands when they were younger, it has a real force of attraction. Because recreating portraits or brick paintings is not common and can help make art more accessible. The material used therefore allows an additional reading and refers to personal memories since the Lego revives the child that there is in us.
“When I was a kid, I had boxes of Lego, I built like many children, but I had moved on to something else while growing up,” says Aymeric Gillet, says M’brick. After a career as a professional hockey player, he now creates impressive 3D representations made only of bricks. “I was not strong in painting or art,” recalls the quarantine, based in Dijon. “One day I saw a pixelated image and it immediately reminded me of Lego. I tested by reproducing a painting by Andy Warhol for my girlfriend and I never let go of my bricks. M’brick is now a full-time artist. He makes works of street art exhibited in the streets of the Burgundian capital but also real paintings that are commissioned from him or for exhibitions.
When play meets art
The incursion of everyday objects into art is a fairly old phenomenon. Dadaism emerging after the First World War will stage newspapers as works of art but it is above all pop art, in the 1960s, which will consecrate this practice. “For the arrival of games or toys in art, there is the fluxus movement which arrives at the same time as pop art”, rewinds Clémence de Montgolfier, researcher in art history and art specialist contemporary. “The artist Robert Filliou will, for example, create works with dice, wheels, toys that can be rotated…”
From the 1980s, France was also affected by the policy of the Minister of Culture at the time, Jack Lang, in favor of greater cultural democracy. “The different arts will then be decompartmentalized and we will place art deco and the fine arts, which until then were more elitist, on an equal footing. In music too, this will allow rock’n’roll to finally be recognized as a cultural and artistic practice in its own right,” explains the specialist.
It is therefore not surprising that artists are now tempted to divert the traditional use of Lego to create their works. “They are a means of recreation but also of recreation,” rejoices Paulina Aubey. She specifies that Lego Masters clearly plays in this game. “We try to show manufacturers who have their mark, their style, their universe, like artists in the end. »
The power of the brick
Brick artists, by seizing Lego, also quickly understand the power of this material. Object occupying a place of choice in both popular culture and the childlike soul of adults, their use is generally a source of enthusiasm and curiosity. “Legos are super-powerful, you can do whatever you want with them, but they’re still Legos,” enthuses M’brick. The paintings I make always have a lot of impact because I mobilize hundreds of pieces. People recognize the elements they held in their hands when they were younger, it has a real force of attraction. Because recreating portraits or brick paintings is not common and can help make art more accessible. The material used therefore allows an additional reading and refers to personal memories since the Lego revives the child that there is in us.
“We are in a time when we value old-school practices a lot”, analyzes Clémence de Montgolfier, comparing the return of Lego with that of embroidery, knitting or coloring for adults. “All these “do-it-yourself” practices have been brought up to date and rid themselves of the clichés that surround them. It is part of a movement in the history of art, but also in cultural history. It is for this reason that playing Lego, even as an adult, no longer necessarily refers to the image of a nerd holed up in his room between manga and Pokémon figurines.
Paulina Aubey is moreover the antithesis of this very simplistic cliché, although she is a fan of The Big Bang Theory. From her first brick and 2D paintings, she was quickly invited to conventions organized by the Danish brand. She was spotted after a gathering of brick artists in Bristol, England, and joined a contemporary art collective in Chicago. She says she realized a “fantasy” that she thought was unrealizable by exhibiting her creations during the summer of 2022 at the Charles Péguy Museum in Orléans. “I had this crazy dream when I started out as an artist, where I voted myself into a super serious museum. It’s something I saw myself doing with my pastels and finally I succeeded with my bricks… It’s a funny wink that proves that you always have to believe in it. »