Laurent Nicolas, born in France, lives and works between France and Finland. After obtaining a higher diploma in ceramic design at the Olivier de Serres school in Paris, where the object's function is essential for him, he naturally moved towards a higher certificate in applied arts Mode and Environment obtained at the Duperré school.
He is developing a furniture program based on manipulation, experimentation with a clear choice of industrial materials diverted from their original use. In recent years, therefore, he has been able to work on objects at the scale of the body, whereas previously linked to the scale of the hand.
On the occasion of various competitions, obtaining funding then enabled him to start a freelance designer activity where design projects, scenographies and interior fittings come together, again changing proportions. The edition of objects and furniture crystallizes collaborations with companies such as Domeau & Pérès, Ecart International, Christophe Delcourt, Collection Particulière, which give rise to presentations at various exhibitions in France and abroad. Laurent designed, for many years, high-end fashion products, which led him to meet many artisans and manufacturers.
The discovery of know-how, techniques, technologies and various materials enrich his vocabulary. His multidirectional career path, while coherent, will show that craftsmanship has always been a prominent concern for him, whether through furniture projects and small series or tailor-made objects. The attention paid to the gesture and its quality of execution has always been part of it.
Based on these different experiences, Laurent has been working as a plastician artist for the past fifteen years, combining photography, drawing and sculpture.
Art and craft counterbalance a strong feeling we have about industries and global economies. The porosity that these two terms mutually maintain calls for a return to individuality, to the gesture, to the work of thought associated with this gesture towards others. Art-craftsmanship becomes essential, reassuring and therefore contemporary.
As a plastician artist, his general practice is divided between 2 and 3 dimensions: drawings on paper, on photographic collages on the one hand and wood, stone, paper and ceramic sculptures on the other. These two results echo the notions he develops.
Oscillating between drawing borrowing from slowness close to meditation and ceramic sculpture with associated rope, among other things, he attaches particular importance to the process of creation and realization, the two being inevitably linked. The ceramic medium, an element very present in the work of Laurent Nicolas, is a technical step and not an end in itself.
He uses this material associated with its implementation to tell a story, conveying a message that seems to him nowadays at the heart of our preoccupations. The idea of connections between individuals, peoples, times and places are at the heart of the matter. To do this, the ropes, an ancestral element, and the knots, the practice of ropes, are for him the obvious emanation that our world, and well beyond, is made up of elements linked to each other directly or indirectly.
