NICOLAS BUFFE
Nicolas Buffe’s work, at first glance, is not very serious. His imagination is inhabited by comic strip characters, icons of video games, and other animation stars: an imagination that refuses the adult world and turns its back to contemporary art’s current references. As if confirming this refusal, Buffe structures his compositions with an ornamental repertory inherited from the Renaissance and 18th century: cartouches, grotesques. With an astonishing virtuosity and irrefutable sense of humor, he combines the “high culture” of the museum world and the “underground culture” of his youth.
But Buffe’s work isn’t by far only a postmodernist joke or a decorative pastime. It is punctured by a much more profound question, which totally justifies his references to the Renaissance, the question of ‘artistic inventiveness’. For Nicolas Buffe, just as for the Renaissance artists, invention is in fact a derivative of discovery and craftsmanship. The inventor is not the one who creates without a previous model thanks to his own genius, but is in fact the person who discovers in pre-existent works remarkable shapes, isolates them and creates new combinations. In this way, a craftsman creates a new machine from used odds and ends; a decorator uses motifs already drawn to create new images. The master Artist-Craftsman-Decorator is not a person whose genius isolates from the human species, but is in fact a person able to create original associations using shapes put together like puzzle pieces.
By adopting the ornamental structure of the Renaissance grotesques as a background to his compositions, Nicolas Buffe has chosen a type of decoration based essentially on his subjective choices : les grotesques are hybrids in which the most daring associations are permitted, if not recommended. Nicolas Buffe’s work, much more serious than it first appears, conjugating pure invention, pleasure and knowledge.
King Kong and the Beauty, Romeo and Juliette, Sleeping Beauty, Mario and the princess Peach, Poliphili and Polia, the legend of Kuzunoha…Many classic and pop love stories that Nicolas Buffe will enjoy exploring again for his first solo show in New York, The game of love and chance.
Nicolas Buffe was born in 1978 in France and lives and works in Paris and Tokyo. He graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 2006. His work has been exhibited in several institutions in France (La Maison Rouge Foundation, Paris ; La Chapelle des Calvairiennes, Mayenne) and abroad (The Contemporary Art Museum of Tokyo).