Sculptor & Painter

Artist & Engineer

Paris & Grenoble 

Instagram: @giloz_gilles_noziere

Website: www.giloz.art         

Mail: giloz@giloz.art

For a long time, I wondered about the relationship between abstract painting and abstract sculpture. In the history of art, we find polychrome works on the one hand and paintings using volume in fine relief on the other; but the two fields are rarely brought together. Initially, I concentrated my approach and research on the instinctive sensation of color as such. What is color and what is it composed of? What is refraction, what is diffraction?

In a parallel, exploratory approach, I had also considered the artistic expression of non-tangible phenomena such as energy, heat and gravity, and had produced works in this field.

But color, as such, is much more than that, and this is a recurring debate in the history of art. What we call color, what artists call color, what art historians call color, is in fact a material in itself, made up of metal oxides or earths, made special by their ability to emit a pure color signal. Artists have always mixed this emissive material with others: ox gall, egg, cement, plaster, linseed oil and, more recently, synthetic binders. This is what they commonly called "color". For me, it was a question of dissociating one from the other, of working with color as a material; in other words, of working directly with the materials that serve as the basis for a colored emission.

To achieve this, I worked with oxides, metallic derivatives and colored earths, and sought to replace the usual binders with a new material. A mass material, three-dimensional and transparent, so that color (in the material sense) can express itself freely. That's why I turned to polymers in general. They are a trace of living matter, as they come from living organisms buried underground over the years. In this sense - and paradoxically - they retain a profound ecological dimension. As long as they are not wasted on a massive scale with the sole aim of extracting the energy they contain by burning them en masse. After years of research, I have mastered the integration of color-emitting materials into environmentally-friendly transparent polymers. These allow for in-depth color emissions, i.e. in superimposed planes, and not just at the level of the fictitious surface, as is usually the case in statuary.

I'm passionate about penetrating the new territories of art history and bringing them to the viewer, through the free and direct inscription of energy in matter. Keeping track of this energy in the works and addressing the body and senses directly, without going through words and semiological thinking. Breaking out of the fictional space of the painting - in the tradition of Klein and beyond the limits of performance art - breaking out of the opaque volumes of statuary whose interior is inaccessible and remains as fictitious as a painting, even when colored - as in the artistic approach of Niki de Saint Phalle. From now on, my sculptures open up a new field, which is the pure expression of energy embodied in matter, whose trace is present and irradiates space. In the spirit of the powerful anonymous Palaeolithic paintings on the irregular walls of the Grotte Chauvet, or the English School of Henry Moore, Tony Cragg or Damien Hirst, or even Calder, fields of action for all sensitive and practicable energies. I'm often reminded of Claude Monet, Yan Van Eyck or Auguste Rodin, all of whom sought this transcendence and often came up against restrictive flatness. 

I'm a climber and the mountains give me the need to find new paths. That's why my provincial studio is in Grenoble, as the quest for the peaks gives me the energy to find unusual paths. 

In addition to opening up a field of action, I link different worlds - painting and sculpture, energy and matter, gesture and desire, color and transparency, palpable and impalpable, acted and unacted - in the tradition of Lee Ufan's Japanese Mono-ha movement or traditional Wabi Sabi. My research has opened up a new field. 

Gilles Nozière, November 2023

BIOGRAPHY

I work in my studio in Paris and in my studio in Grenoble.

Having always practised an artistic and technical approach and been involved in the community, I have followed two parallel and interdependent paths:

-A career as a painter and sculptor: Exhibitions (Galerie Forsale in Paris in 2015, Les Frigos in Paris since 2022) Salons (Charenton, Saint Maurice, Grenoble) and Private Collections

-A career as a performer-engineer until 2022: founder of successful disruptive companies in the environment and energy sectors

My background :

-New Atelier des Beaux-Arts de Paris

-Ateliers du Louvre

-Design Akademie Eindhoven

-Engineering school

For sculpture, I use various techniques: clay, resin, plaster, Florentine bronze, steel, metal, etc., and for painting, mainly acrylic or oil on canvas.

Ambidextrous, I like to work with parallel dynamics.