Biography

Born in 1976 in Reims, Nicolas Boulard studied at the École supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, where he graduated in 2002.
He then joined the Collège Invisible, networked postgraduate studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. His artwork has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in France (Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Frac Alsace, Frac Aquitaine, the art center la Halle des bouchers) and abroad (Moma in San Francisco, Machine Project in Los Angeles, S-air in Japan). He lives in Clamart, near Paris.

Over the past two decades, Nicolas Boulard has built an artistic oeuvre based on the interaction of knowledge and practices that are usually unrelated. For him, art is born from blending, like most wines. The field of gastronomy and viticulture are thus the starting point for a research on the modalities of creation. Nicolas Boulard questions art in the terms of his deep knowledge of winemaking processes. And reciprocally he shakes the rules of viticulture by holding up the mirror of art to it. All his work heterogeneously mixes artistic vocabulary and grammar with borrowings from other fields. It is an interdisciplinary and “undisciplined” work.

Quotations are frequent in Nicolas Boulard’s work, particularly from the minimal art of the 1970s. In the body of work entitled Specific Cheeses he studies the subject of forms from the impertinently highlighted relationships between cheese and minimal art. By equating artistic and gastronomic production, he questions the nature and origin of form and the scale of values attached to it.

In a landscape of artistic creation in which artists have challenged traditional categories, Nicolas Boulard positions himself with apparent levity even more on the margins of recognized practices, formally and conceptually. He questions art as language. But beyond that, he investigates our relationship to social issues such as territory and sustainability. His work is an unseemly but necessary heterogeneity, an encouragement to disobedience, against blind conformity.

Nicolas Boulard creates sculptures and installations by combining references from minimal and conceptual art with organic materials, mostly from food production. His works wittily destroy the aseptic aesthetic of American minimalism, drawing inspiration from the structured forms of cheese, wine, or bread.
The appropriation of fermentation materials is characteristic of his research and produces unique and uncommon work: fermentation is the transition from one state to another, in which the effect of microorganisms such as yeast irreversibly alters the original nature of a material. This process of transformation is as much a source of inspiration as it is a method of working.
Through wood and felt cutting, large-format prints on paper, plaster or bronze casts, his works reflect an ongoing process. Based on elements gathered from his everyday environment and art history, his works take on an indeterminate appearance, as if taken in an intermediate stage.
The geometric aesthetic disrupted by the use of living matter reminds us that art is a transitional practice.
With the use of natural materials such as felt or wood, his works convey powerful concepts that can give us a special experience. His art practice puts the viewer in an ambiguous situation with the work: whether in front of the decorative extravagance of a tapestry made from the image of penicillium spreading in a slice of blue Roquefort cheese , or the strange arrangement of holes in bread crumbs in
slices, carefully cut out in poplar wood planks. Such assemblies are similar to the Grotesques that, at different times in art history, have intrigued by highlighting a taste for hybridization, metamorphosis, and caricature.