Green Skull - Lego, 2023

BrickBoardBuilder  

A green skull on a yellow wall. It is hard to be more head-on: a square format, a centred subject, two colours that collide. Green Skull takes up one of the oldest motifs in the history of art, the vanitas, and runs it through a pop filter. A death’s head that is not out to frighten, but to burst with colour.

The skull is built across the full range of greens, from fir to lime, and modelled on the forehead with flashes of white, cream and sky blue. The eye sockets, outlined in black, are not empty: they overflow with pink, fuchsia, purple and lavender, like two bouquets. More floral touches dot the temples and the top of the head, and the jaw reveals a row of ivory teeth. It calls to mind Mexican calaveras as much as Warhol’s Skulls: here, death is celebrated in colour.

The background deserves a closer look. This yellow is not a flat colour but a built monochrome: hundreds of bricks, plates, slopes and arches in the same shade, set at different heights. It is the shadows that do the drawing, and they change with the daylight.

Up close, the details give the subject its full meaning. Tiles printed with 100 banknotes are scattered through the skull, and another bears the word “FAME” in the yellow: money and glory, exactly what classical vanitas paintings pointed to as fleeting. Luck of the stock or a knowing wink, it is up to each viewer to decide. Around them, small leaves, lavender flowers, yellow stars along the outline and two ornate purple tiles complete the treasure hunt.

Brick Board Builder assembles his works by hand, without a predefined blueprint, using LEGO® bricks that are all reclaimed: arriving loose from all over France, some thanks to the solidarity-based non-profit Rejoué, they are cleaned and then sorted one by one. Pieces that had finished their first life, brought together in a work about what passes and what remains: Green Skull can never be remade identically.

Neither a print nor a reproduction: a one-of-a-kind piece, numbered, bearing the artist’s plaque and delivered with its certificate of authenticity.