Jardin a la française
 

If Andre LeNotre, the architect of the gardens of Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles would present a design for a garden today, he most certainly would do this with 3-D graphic software. Detailed studies of the various elements might look like these pictures. Turned in a perspective, that simulates the point of view of a 3.50 meters tall spectator, isolated, and placed on a off white space, illumination settings on ”diffused”and ”omni'.

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Archival Pigment Prints, Alu Dibond/Matt Acrylic Glas (various sizes), 2004

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„Jardin a la française focuses on the lushly-manicured gardens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with their strict axiality’s and topiary labyrinths. Channeling the adverbial relationship between Western man and his wild natural surroundings, the artist succeeded in abstracting the pure formalism and orthogonal willfulness of pre-modern landscape architecture, to mesmerizing effect. Bergbauer’s garden studies conjure the seductive mannerism of Robbe-Gillet and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad.

Kevin Greenberg, The Last Magazine, Issue #10, 2013

„Originally a stage for extravagant festivities as part of life at court, baroque gardens are associated with sensual pastimes. Visiting these gardens today, their prior function no longer exists. Often, the castles to which the gardens once belonged, are no longer exisiting and in many cases the gardens have after many years of neglect or destruction, been re-instated. In his series Jardin a la francaise, the artist plays with these notions of loss and rebirth. Divorced from it's function, what remains is the form and with that a mis-en-scne for cultural history; the aesthetically glorified epoch of the baroque.“

Text by Dorothee Schmidt, Exhibition, Jardin a la francaise and Substitutes