Red Skull - Lego, 2023

BrickBoardBuilder  

Green on yellow for Green Skull, yellow on red for Yellow Skull, and now red on green: from one work to the next, the background of the last becomes the subject of the following one. With Red Skull, colour has come full circle. And it ends on the tensest pairing in the series, two complementary colours that repel each other as much as they attract. The skull does not sit on the green wall, it bursts out of it.

The red runs from vermilion to carmine, lifted with bright orange and darkened with brown at the edges. The forehead opens onto an area of cream, white and pale pink, and the cheekbones are underlined in fuchsia and purple. In the eye sockets, ringed in black, sky blue and lavender mingle with a few touches of green, as if the background had slipped into the gaze. Beneath the black cavity of the nose, a row of ivory teeth topped with a line of pink gives this death’s head a thoroughly lively air.

The background is a built monochrome, all plates, slopes, round pieces and plant stems laid flat. But this green is not innocent: it is scattered with tiles printed with 100 banknotes, more than a dozen of them, spreading right into the skull. The colour of money lines the wall of a vanitas, and the subject needs no comment.

Up close, other finds are waiting. A printed eye, set in the middle of the forehead like a third eye. Two orange tiles marked “ADVENTURE”, and a white one marked “RESCUE”, lost in the green. On the left temple, a sky-blue sign decorated with a fish and a turtle. So many fragments of stories, torn from the boxes these pieces came from.

For each of them has had a first life. Brick Board Builder works only with reclaimed LEGO® bricks, 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, and that is what makes Red Skull 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.