French artist travels around Russia to find inspiration

Two-month trip across Russia has inspired a French artist to address the darkest corners of human soul.

Bertrand Planes will long be recalled in the Russian art community as an extravagant French artist who suddenly decided to travel all over the country in search of inspiration.

“For me, it was not only an 11,000-kilometer trip but also an inside trip,” Planes recalls. “It was more about my inner emptiness on the way. The idea was to find a nice rhythm which would permit me to look around and to be mixed with nature.”

Mixes are something the artist really enjoys. His art, Planes says, is itself a curious mix of brain work and heart work, of science and fifth sense.

“It is about mixing intuition and scientific way of thinking,” the artist told RT. “I believe there is a link between them that our brain is unable to embrace.”

The trip around Russia filled the artist’s mind with new ideas. His exhibition for the Biennale, Planes said, is based on a deep philosophic pretext.

“It’s about perception: the installations are all in white colors, so they give people possibility to project their own thoughts and feelings,” Planes told RT. “It’s very difficult to face emptiness and whiteness. We don’t really want to feel the way we are, so we try to answer questions, to find reasons.”