Nicolas Boulard is welcomed for a 2013 residency. He lives and works in Clamart, in the live-in workshops of the Plaine quarter. Over the course of this year, he develops projects with the residents of Clamart, pursues his artistic explorations, and undertakes the creation of new artworks. His interests lie in the utopias of the end of the 19th century and in the inventions that arose with the development of viniculture. He also explores various forms of unique pendulums on one of the first aircraft. These pieces are exhibited at the Chanot Art Centre starting on October 5th, 2013, for the exhibition “The Rule of Cool”.
“Blending different fields of knowledge and practices that are normally completely unrelated is at the heart of my artistic exploration. It can, for example, create connections between artistic concepts and winemaking methods, or even bring together minimalist artforms and forms of cheese. The Specific Cheeses Guild was founded in this way, in order to celebrate the eponymous project that I’ve been leading since 2010 on the formal relationships between minimal art and cheesemaking : a conference, the production of cheese from moulds based on the 12 forms outlined in Forms Derived from a Cube by Sol Lewitt, print runs, and a guild united in costumes and hats constituted this project. I’m currently pursuing work entitled Obsolete Variables. It focusses on the winemaking inventions developed at the end of the 19th century that can today seem terribly absurd or grotesque, such as the “anti-hail canon” or the Givaudan flying machine. Throughout my creative residency, I will continue this work that shifts codes from one universe to another. Explorations, artistic productions, and engagements with audiences invited to follow these projects’ evolution are the foundation of this residency, which will conclude with an exhibition in the spaces of the Art Centre.”
Biography of Nicolas Boulard
Nicolas Boulard was born in 1976 in Reims. He lives and works in Clamart. Graduate of the École des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2002, Nicolas Boulard develops an artistic approach where historical references to modern and postmodern art are woven into his personal history, having grown up in a family of champagne producers.
“Nicolas Boulard locates the sources of his artistic work in the terroir, where it is generally a matter of material mutation and the resurgence of forms. […] After having generated a set of pieces exploring and distorting, by means of chemical transformations, the rules, procedures, and know-how regulating viticulture, he has been working towards a veritable aesthetic revolution in the world of cheese since 2010. At the origin of this new preoccupation is the observation of a formal proximity between the shapes of cheese and the shapes of Minimal Art, underpinned by the artist’s conference inaugurating the Specific Cheeses project. From these “cultural products”, the artist completes this fusion by creating a set of cheeses whose forms are adopted from The 12 Forms Derived from a Cube (1982) by Sol Lewitt and produced according to the rules of art by artisans from Brie de Meaux, Chavignol, etc. Taking a resolutely performative turn, this project is accompanied by the founding of the Guild of Specific Cheeses, a community of select members in costume, brought together to defend these dairy creations, in and beyond the artistic realm. […] Nicolas Boulard’s artistic practice is thus composed of transversal paths, where formal concerns generate endless digressions, shifting from one disciplinary field to another and acting as an indicator of the tight bonds that unite them.”
Hanna Alkema
