Born in 1976 in Reims, Nicolas Boulard studied at the École supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, where he graduated in arts in 2002. He then joined the Collège Invisible, networked post-graduate studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. His artistic work has been shown in several solo exhibitions in France (Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Frac Alsace, Frac Aquitaine, the art center la Halle des bouchers) and abroad (MOMA in San Francisco, Machine Project in Los Angeles, S-air in Japan). He lives in Clamart near Paris.

During the past twenty years, Nicolas Boulard has been building an artistic work at the crossroads of knowledges and practices that usually have no relation to each other. For him, art comes from blending, like most wines. The field of gastronomy and viticulture are thus the starting point for an investigation of the modalities of creation. Nicolas Boulard questions art in terms of his in-depth knowledge of wine-making processes. And reciprocally, he shakes up the rules of viticulture by handing him the mirror of art. All of his work heterogeneously mixes artistic vocabulary and grammar with borrowings from other fields. It is an interdisciplinary and « undisciplined » work.

In the work of Nicolas Boulard, citations are frequent, in particular from the minimal art of the 70s. The works entitled Specific Cheeses studies the subject of forms starting from relationships highlighted with impertinence between cheese and minimal art. Putting artistic and gastronomic production on the same level, he questions the nature and origin of the form and the scale of the values attached to it.

In a landscape of artistic creation where artists have challenged traditional categories, Nicolas Boulard positions himself with an apparent lightness even more on the fringes of recognized practices, from a formal and conceptual point of view. He questions art as language. But beyond that, it questions our relationship to societal issues such as territory and sustainability. His work is unseemly but necessary heterogeneity, an encouragement to disobedience, against blind conformism.

Nicolas Boulard creates sculptures and installations by bringing references from minimalist art and conceptual art together with organic materials mostly coming from food production.
His artworks wittily disrupt the aseptic aesthetics of the American minimalism, inspired by the structured shapes of cheese, wine or bread. The appropriation of materials from the fermentation is characteristic of his work and produces a unique and uncommon work: the fermentation is the transition from one state to another, in which the effect of microorganisms such as yeasts irreversibly alters the original nature of a material. This transformation process is as much a source of inspiration as a working method. Through wood and felt cutting, prints on large format paper, plaster or bronze casts, his artworks re ect an ongoing process. Based on elements collected in his daily environment and in history of art, his works take on an indeterminate appearance, as if caught up in an intermediate state. The geometric aesthetics disrupted by the use of living matter reminds us that art is a practice about transition. With the use of natural materials such as felt or wood, his works convey powerful concepts and give us a special experience. His art practice puts the viewer in an ambiguous situation with the work: whether facing the decorative extravagance of a tapestry made from the image of penicillium diffusing into a slice of Roquefort blue cheese (Penicillium #1 and #2) or the strange arrangement of the holes in the crumb of oversized bread slices and carefully cut in poplar wood boards (Pain #1 and #2). Such assemblies are akin to the Grotesques which, at different times of history of art, have intrigued by highlighting a taste of hybridization, metamorphosis, and caricature.