Peur bleue - Lego, 2024

BrickBoardBuilder  

The title is a play on words, and the work takes it literally. In French, “avoir une peur bleue”, literally “to have a blue fear”, means to be scared stiff: Mickey, mouth wide open, eyes bulging, hand raised in front of him, recoils from something we will never see. And all around him, blue.

The composition does half the work. The character is pushed up against the right-hand edge, cut off by the frame: one ear and half the body remain out of shot. The whole left side is empty, a smooth sky blue without a single brick. That is where the danger lies, precisely where there is nothing to see. Brick Board Builder leaves the viewer to imagine what could so frighten the most famous mouse in the world.

The Mickey chosen is the original one, from the first black-and-white cartoons. Deep black for the ears and body, white for the face and glove, a whole range of greys for the two-button shorts and the big round shoe. A single colour breaks the greyscale: the red of the tongue, planted at the centre of the scream. The eye keeps coming back to it.

Up close, each area has its own texture. The black is worked tone on tone, with pieces that only raking light reveals. The white of the face mixes smooth tiles, round plates and curved pieces that follow the roundness of the cheek. The grey of the shoe looks like exposed machinery: gears, gear racks, Technic elements. There is also a small chain hanging from the glove, an orange tip set on the cheek and a few printed tiles scattered here and there.

Mickey will soon be a hundred years old; the bricks he is made of have also lived before. Brick Board Builder works only with reclaimed LEGO® pieces, which arrived loose from all over France, notably thanks to the solidarity-based non-profit Rejoué, and were then cleaned and sorted one by one. He assembles them by hand, without a predefined blueprint: Peur Bleue can never be remade identically.

A one-of-a-kind piece, numbered, bearing the artist’s plaque and delivered with its certificate of authenticity.