BERTRAND LICART
BIC AND GOLD

Betrand Licart

Archaeology of the Gaze from September 10 to October 10, 2026

Opening reception on September 10, 2026, RSVP

The works presented in the exhibition emerge from a slow excavation, an inner archaeology in which stone becomes matter, memory, and perception all at once. Menhirs, stelae, asteroid fragments, sculpted cliffs, Shiva lingams... Humanity has always projected onto rock a presence that goes beyond the material’s simple, tangible nature. Stone passes through civilizations like a silent core around which beliefs, fears, and attempts to understand the world and the universe revolve.

Bertrand Licart’s work is part of this quest, at the crossroads of introspection and active contemplation.
The Bic pen .... an ordinary, almost humble tool .... becomes an instrument of sedimentation. Layer after layer, the blue asserts itself, intensifies; it creates darkness, without obscuring the light.
The paper is no longer a surface but a space for immersion, a place of mental excavation, a form of self-hypnosis in which moments of uncertainty, remnants of vision, and traces of consciousness emerge.

The square, a symbol of stability and a structure of grounding, enters into dialogue with gold, that ancient symbol of permanence and the sacred. Between geology, contemplation, and erasure, the works unfold like the remains of a perception in transformation. They do not seek to reveal a truth, but to make visible what remains when the gaze accepts that it can no longer control what it sees, when the mind relinquishes control.

Biography

Bertrand Licart, a visual artist, has been developing a singular body of work for several decades, at the intersection of gesture and contemplation. He has exhibited in Germany, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. His works can be found in contemporary art spaces as well as in private collections, architectural projects, and places that foster a sensitive experience of seeing and attention. His career reflects a constant commitment: to make his artistic practice an act of presence, a path of honesty toward oneself.

In his native France and later in Germany, he spent his formative years at a Rudolf Steiner school, where creativity, sensitive observation, and freedom of gesture became the foundation of his relationship with the world. In Paris, he trained in theatre under the mime master Marcel Marceau, and studied painting and fresco with the painter Nicolaï Greschny, heir to the Byzantine iconographic tradition. With him, he discovered the techniques of the Old Masters, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Upon arriving in Canada, he studied cello at Université Laval in Quebec City.

The core of his artistic vision emerged through decisive encounters with Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, and Éric Baret, whose teachings he followed. Creation then became a space of openness, where the act of painting is never separated from breath or inner life. As a result, his practice evolved into one that is deeply spiritual, and from that point onward has been influenced by the great non-dual traditions, the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra, and Kashmir Shaivism.

For Bertrand Licart, artistic practice is therefore a path of stripping away. He explores the notions of presence and a space of silence where one can finally perceive what escapes hurried eyes. Like a mirror, the canvas reveals beliefs and conditioning, those layers of thoughts and emotions that cloud vision, inviting us toward the simplest nakedness of what is.