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PETIT IMMO 77: MEET NICOLAS BIANCO
If there is one noble material associated with the past and a certain austerity, unappealing to younger generations, it is marble. Nicolas Bianco reinvents it and brilliantly brings it up to date through his art. Let's dive into his incredibly modern and unexpected world.
Nicolas was born in Nice in 1982. A self-taught artist, he is rooted in the living tradition of the École de Nice. From childhood, he was immersed in the influences of Klein, Arman, César, Sosno, Venet, and Ben, who revealed to him the audacity of contemporary art and its boundaries to be pushed.
Initially involved in restoration, communication, and interior design, Nicolas experimented with various professions before discovering his artistic vocation in 2017. One of his first creations was the famous LEGO brick: spontaneous, playful, and revealing a deep desire to bring our childhood and adolescence into the present and turn them into memorial creations.
Nicolas often refers to “positive nostalgia”: he sculpts in marble to capture happy memories of childhood or adolescence. How can we not mention that basketball, or a skateboard, a Game Boy, or that iconic PEZ candy dispenser!
These purely materialistic objects have the power to stir emotions within us, feelings that are as personal as they are intense. They embody an era that we can touch and anchor in our own time.
Bianco works mainly with Carrara marble, but there are other types of marble such as Salomé, Rosso Levanto, and Marquina, which he uses depending on his inspiration or the project.
But his art does not simply stop at reintroducing iconic objects into our landscape. He gives them a very personal meaning by incorporating a Japanese technique: Kintsugi. But what is it? It is an ancient Japanese technique that appeared in the 15th century, which consists of repairing broken ceramics by gluing them back together with urushi lacquer. Urushi lacquer is a natural resin extracted from the urushi tree. Mixed with gold powder, this paste can then be used to repair the object in a visible way. A method that, while the object may be devalued, will instead enhance its value! The cracks are like scars symbolizing resilience and the philosophy of Wabi-sabi. This Japanese philosophy celebrates the beauty of imperfection and simplicity, valuing the marks of time and authenticity.
Nicolas adapts it visually with a signature sometimes in fine gold leaf, sometimes in Klein blue. This approach symbolizes resilience and pays homage to the School of Nice, while modernizing an ancestral practice.
He pursues his creative quest with curiosity and energy. Through his work, he not only perpetuates the memories of his childhood, but also offers the public a lasting aesthetic experience, nourished by his roots in Nice and his passion for pop culture. He embodies an almost perfect junction between the past and the contemporary.
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Nicolas Bianco is undoubtedly one of Nice's most fascinating sculptors, whose art evokes memories of the 1980s and 1990s using a thousand-year-old material. With his bold, modern aesthetic, he skillfully combines marble with precious gilding, incorporating cultural references. It is a feat to transform a trivial object into sculpted poetry, a vibrant link between childhood, art, and lasting emotion.
