A word from the artist
“Creator of expression supports”
The direction my work has taken has been influenced by observing the world of visual arts. While pictorial expression has constantly evolved over time, through varied mediums, techniques and styles, the support has remained almost unchanged in its form, its flatness, its material and its way of occupying the exhibition space.
Of course, we have the skateboard, which is now acquired as a medium of expression in its own right, as well as the surfboard, but these two objects, usual above all, were not designed especially for the artistic expression.
Following this observation, I then had to think about and design supports truly dedicated to artistic expression, as was the linen canvas on a wooden frame in its time.
Biography
Nicolas Garreau is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in 1983. Son of the interior designer Raymonde Durst and the painter Jean-Jacques Garreau, known as Garo, everything destined little Nicolas to an artistic career, his first ceramics dating from kindergarten.
Design, modeling and painting of small objects are the teenager's daily bread and after studying pastry arts, with his diploma in hand, the young man sets off to discover the world and settles in London where he works as a pastry chef for five years.
Following a serious accident which calls into question his life choices at the time, he decides to dedicate himself entirely to his true passion, sculpture, and to change his place of life to settle in a city where art is everywhere : Barcelona.
In the Catalan capital, he self-taught a range of modeling, casting and reproduction techniques, mainly busts of comic strip characters for the private collections of European clients.
In 2017, he left Barcelona and flew to Guadeloupe, where he realized that earth could be used as a molding material in its own right. He thus created wax tealight holders which subsequently became lamps, the “Luminescences”.
He subsequently imagined a process for manufacturing paper based on recycled cardboard with the aim of creating fresco notebooks. The first step in creating the means of expression that will make up the heart of his work has been taken.
After a two-year stay in the Antilles, Nicolas Garreau decided to return to Paris to continue his artistic work based on new ideas and a style specific to his exploration. He then developed techniques allowing him to create sculpture lamps based on colored wax and synthetic plaster, the Luminescence. Furthermore, synthetic plaster became his material of choice. It is the turn of Saintonge to see the light of day in his Parisian workshop, which he soon left to settle in the countryside in Auvergne where he created his plastic arts workshop.
It was there that he finished developing the production line for Saintonges.
His intuition and research then led him to create the composition Canopée.
It is on this support that he creates the first chromatic variations in pigmented synthetic plaster covered with resin.
Canopée is followed by the creation of the first Haptic Pyramid on which he resumes his chromatic variations.
In spring 2023, he then imagines Pulsar, the kinetic canvas, a support which allows him new pictorial explorations.
At the dawn of the year 2024, the artistic epic of Nicolas Garreau comes together in the present.
