Nicolas Chardon

Nicolas Chardon
Period: 2008-2009
Profession: Painter If I’m a painter who makes paintings, I’m also one of those whose studio has no walls. Since 1998, my paintings have been almost exclusively responses to specific situations and contexts. Because of their traditional nature as paintings, i.e. a canvas stretched over a frame, the pieces I create always remain mobile, moving, and, accompanying the drift of the painted figures, always seem able to adapt flexibly to new spaces. My project for the Villa Medici is therefore to work in a studio for a year, in fact, to play in the studio and have the studio play the various functions of work: study, produce, exhibit, classify, archive, store. My stay in Rome will be an opportunity to put the question of autonomy to the test. For which space is a work designed? Can the place of production be a specific place, or is it a generic place? What is the relationship between time, work and vision, and the practice of the studio? For me, the Villa Médicis will be an unprecedented, albeit absolutely classical, field of experimentation, with which my practice, marked by modern thinking on specificity, will necessarily have to negotiate.