The Colas Suspended Garden and the Buisson Optique

Bernard Lassus has reached unprecedented heights of creativity with two major projects, fighting against an unconscionable forced overgrowth of cities and buildings, carried out, not out of love for nature, but as ecological rigour taken to extremes. The Colas Suspended Garden and the Buisson Optique, in Boulogne (Paris), are on the borderline between a contemporary work of art and a garden, an installation and a recreational space.

The first intervention is divided into three sections representing the seasonal progression of nature, in which nature is “held in suspense” by the material, as all the vegetation is made of plastic or resins in a variety of colours.

Elements of the classical garden are taken up, vegetal backdrops that become refined carvings that play with light to create an atmosphere of mystery, beyond nature and culture. All perspectives are annulled or amplified, depending on the composition of the planes: annulled when the slender trees are leaning against the walls, yellow and red silhouettes on a blue background; amplified when the fake creepers that look like tapestries to the visitor mask the paths, overlap and reveal new points of view, creating secluded, hidden places.

With the Buisson Optique, Lassus fully achieves his aim of creating a visual playground, which is not walkable but has a texture so dense that it confuses the eye and the mind.

Thin lines of a thousand colours run parallel, carrying delicate flowering plants between them; these in turn blend with the pure colour of the lines, so that it is difficult to discern between nature and artifice.

This is precisely the idea behind the two projects: to look at the natural world and its beauty, to understand it, and to elevate it through artistic landscaping (there are clear influences from abstraction and chromatic art, where the work is composed of pure figures, of signs and lines, and the variety of colours stimulates the observer’s imagination) to a new, purer essence, limiting the inclusion of plant species where they could not live, while not depriving urban areas of the necessary dose of naturalness that allows the well-being of individuals.