Green Skull - Lego, 2023

BrickBoardBuilder  

Red and yellow. The two most classic brick colours, the ones found in every toy box, for the gravest subject there is: a death’s head. Yellow Skull is the companion piece to Green Skull, and turns it inside out. Yellow, which served as the background, becomes the subject here, set against an uncompromising red.

The skull runs through yellow in all its states, from lemon to buttercup, warmed with oranges and hollowed out with browns around the outline. The forehead lights up in white and cream, the temples and chin shift to lime green, the cheekbones are crossed with magenta and purple. Then come the eye sockets, ringed in black and filled with blues: azure, turquoise, lavender, violet. It is the only cold area in the work, and the eye goes straight to it. Lower down, a wide row of white teeth: this skull is laughing with every brick it has.

Around it, the red is a built monochrome. Bricks, plates, arches and half-spheres in the same shade are stacked at different heights, studs showing, and it is the cast shadows that give it its pattern. Nothing about the material is hidden: the work owns where it comes from.

Up close, the hunt for details begins. In the middle of the forehead, a tile decorated with a pink and purple motif is set like a jewel. Small star-printed tiles punctuate the skull, two yellow stars shine on the chin, and tiny black steering wheels slip into the outline. In the red, you can make out a chain and a vehicle chassis, submerged tone on tone.

A childhood toy to speak of passing time: that contrast is at the heart of Brick Board Builder’s work. The artist builds without a plan, by hand, using second-hand LEGO® bricks that arrived loose from all over France, some through the solidarity-based non-profit Rejoué, and were then cleaned and sorted one by one. No other hand could set these pieces down in the same order: Yellow Skull is impossible to remake 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.