Ombrelle - Lego, 2026

BrickBoardBuilder  

A woman standing on a bank, a green parasol, a child in a straw hat, a sky swept by the wind. It is recognisably , the Woman with a Parasol painted by Claude Monet in 1875, one of the most famous images of Impressionism. Brick Board Builder does not rebuild it: he leaves it in place, and builds on top of it.

The bricks take over three elements. First the parasol, built in dark greens and greys, thick enough to cast a very real shadow on the picture. Then the clouds: clusters of pale aqua, lavender, pale pink and sky blue, floating across the sky and spilling over onto the dress. And finally the grass, at the very bottom, dense and bushy, in olive, lime green, sand and grey. Between these masses, the painting remains visible: the woman’s veiled face, the child’s figure, patches of sky. What is left unbuilt was chosen as carefully as the rest, and the two faces are left to Monet.

The idea is more apt than it might seem. The Impressionist brushstroke is a matter of dabs of colour placed side by side, which the eye blends at a distance. The brick does exactly the same thing. A century and a half apart, the painter and the builder share the same principle: an image from afar, a material up close. Here, quite simply, the material steps out of the painting.

Up close, whimsy takes over again. Small moulded white clouds mingle with the built ones. A pale blue dolphin swims across the open sky. Ladders link the clouds to one another, a chain hangs in the grass, a lime green spring coils at the foot of the bank. All details that have no business in a Monet, and yet settle into it without disturbing it.

Monet painted fast, outdoors, to capture a moment. Brick Board Builder builds slowly, by hand, without a predefined blueprint, using reclaimed LEGO® bricks that arrived loose from all over France, notably thanks to the solidarity-based non-profit Rejoué, and were then cleaned and sorted one by one. The result can never be remade identically.

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