L'habitant paysagiste

Landscape architect and visual artist Bernard Lassus is participating in the International Garden Festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire for the third time. After Être là un peu+ in 2018, and Le Jardin des hypothèses in 2019, he is back with a garden that pays homage to François Portrat, the sculpture from which is part of the Art Brut collection in Lausanne, Switzerland.

This self-taught artist is well-known for his painted installations and figurines that represent contemporary names in politics, and he worked with pieces of broken glass and plates that he had bought from flea markets or picked up at public landfill sites. He then attached the various pieces together using cement and sand. Using this original technique, François Portrat also produced almost four hundred medallions with newspaper cuttings of images of actors glued to the centre.

This garden is an illustration of the “landscaper inhabitant” concept that is so dear to Bernard Lassus.

Bernard Lassus is a landscape architect and visual artist. He was born in 1929 in Chamalières (Puy-de-Dôme). In 1952, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then taught there between 1968 and 1998. He taught at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Horticulture de Versailles from 1963 to 1969, and created the Jardin noir in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1967, and the Jardin des retours in Rochefort-sur-Mer, which won the Ministry of Culture’s Heritage Prize in 1993. In 1975, he presented his astonishing research on the “landscaper inhabitant” at the Claude Lévi-Strauss seminar at the Collège de France. From 1976 to 1985, he was a lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles which he had helped establish. Since 1989, he has been responsible for many landscaping projects alongside motorways. He has presented his work all over the world including in Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Poland and Venezuela. He exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 2011 and 2017. For the exhibition, Bernard Lassus: un art de la transformation, he laid out an 800 sq.m. Jardin monde (World garden) which explored the contemporary issues shaping the art of landscaping.