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Sunday 16 February

Nicolas Party: The Art of Pastel Reinvented

Published on: 10 December 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

Nicolas Party transforms exhibition spaces into dreamlike theaters where classical painting genres explode into saturated pop visions. His electric-colored pastels create parallel universes where the art of the past dialogues with the most contemporary concerns.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, here comes the time to talk to you about Nicolas Party, born in 1980 in Lausanne. You know, that Swiss artist who’s making waves in the art world with his electric-colored pastels, like neon lights in Geneva’s night. Galleries snatch up his works like teenagers after a new smartphone, and museums scramble to showcase his monumental creations. But let’s not dwell on this market frenzy reeking of triumphant capitalism. Instead, let’s explore what truly sets this artist apart as he transforms each exhibition space into a dreamlike theater.

Let’s first discuss his almost obsessive relationship with pastels, that medium long relegated by art history to the rank of a minor technique. Party discovered it almost by accident, gazing at a Picasso portrait. This chance encounter turned into a personal artistic revolution. His love affair with pastels echoes that of Rosalba Carriera, the 18th-century Venetian artist who had already grasped the medium’s potential. In the 1700s, Carriera revolutionized pastel use, elevating it to a major art form coveted by European courts. Party carries this torch with contemporary boldness, as if Carriera had passed down the secret of luminosity through the ages.

This lineage with Carriera reveals something fundamental in Party’s approach. It reminds us that art history is a long conversation across time, where artists respond to each other like echoes in a cathedral. Party understands this temporal dimension of art perfectly, confronting his works with those of old masters in his exhibitions. This approach recalls Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, a cyclical conception of time. Just as the German philosopher saw in eternal repetition a source of creative power, Party finds surprising innovation in the constant reinterpretation of classical genres.

His monochrome-faced portraits, minimalistic still lifes, and synthetic landscapes aren’t mere stylistic exercises. They are profound reflections on the very nature of pictorial representation. When Party paints a tree, it’s not the tree itself that interests him but the very idea of the tree, its archetypal form. This aligns with Plato’s theory of Ideas, where the sensory world is merely an imperfect reflection of the realm of essences. But Party goes further: he turns these archetypes into pop visions, as if Plato had collaborated with Walt Disney.

Party’s immersive installations redefine our relationship with exhibition spaces. These total environments, where walls become giant canvases, radically transform our experience of art. Party doesn’t just paint pictures; he creates complete universes where architecture becomes integral to the artwork. These transformed spaces recall Renaissance wunderkammern, where art and nature blended in a shared sense of wonder. But while princely collectors sought to own the world in miniature, Party aims to create parallel worlds, alternative universes where the rules of perspective and color obey new logics.

Color in Party’s work is worth a closer look. It’s not merely an attribute of form; it becomes the form itself. His incandescent pinks, ocean-deep blues, and acidic greens don’t describe the world—they reinvent it. This approach to color evokes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s color theory, where each hue manifests a particular expression of divine light. Party secularizes this mystical vision to use it as a tool for transforming reality. His colors don’t mimic nature; they create their own nature.

His recent work on dinosaurs and burning forests reveals a new dimension in his practice. These pieces are no longer mere formal exercises in color and composition; they become meditations on our troubled era, on the possible extinction of our species, and the fragility of our existence on Earth. Party’s dinosaurs aren’t those of paleontology books; they’re ghosts reminding us of our collective mortality. By representing them in intimate formats, Party creates a striking contrast between their historical scale and current depiction, emphasizing the distance separating us from these extinct creatures.

The arches often structuring his installations aren’t mere decorative elements. They function as portals between different states of consciousness and temporalities. Party describes them as “hugs from above”, an image reflecting the protective and encompassing dimension of his art. These arches remind us that true art is a form of passage, a transformation of our perception of the world. They create physical and metaphorical thresholds for the viewer to cross, initiating a new way of seeing.

In his portraits, the unreal-colored faces seem to stare at us from another world, like the masks of a civilization that doesn’t yet exist. These ageless, genderless faces challenge our very conception of identity. They remind us that every portrait is also a self-portrait, that every representation of the other is also a projection of oneself. The eyes, treated as white targets between vulva-evoking eyelids, create a subtle unease, a tension between the familiar and the strange that characterizes his entire oeuvre.

Party’s practice is rooted in a long tradition while joyfully subverting it. He takes the classical genres of painting—portrait, landscape, still life—and propels them into a new dimension where past and present collide in an explosion of color. It’s an art that knows its history but refuses to be imprisoned by it, using tradition as a springboard into the unknown.

Party’s commercial success might raise concerns about complacency. Yet his work continues to evolve, tackling new challenges. His recent explorations on extinction and ecological catastrophe reveal an artist attuned to the issues of our time, capable of using his unique visual language to address the most pressing questions of our age.

His exhibition “L’heure mauve” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts marked a turning point in his practice. By creating a dialogue between his works and the museum’s collections, Party demonstrated his ability to transcend eras and styles. The spaces he created function as time machines, where past and present artworks coexist in silent yet eloquent conversation.

Party’s relationship with architecture deserves mention. His mural interventions aren’t mere decorations; they radically transform our perception of space. By using bold colors and architectural forms like arches, he creates environments that challenge our perceptual habits. These interventions recall Renaissance frescoes but with a decidedly contemporary sensibility.

His use of historical references is particularly sophisticated. It’s not about citations or appropriations but a true digestion and reinvention of art history. His still lifes, for example, engage in dialogue with both Giorgio Morandi and pop art, creating an improbable bridge between different eras and artistic sensibilities.

The theatrical dimension of his work is also remarkable. Every exhibition is conceived as a total staging, where the artworks play precise roles in a complex visual narrative. This scenographic approach transforms the viewer into an actor in an immersive experience that far exceeds the traditional framework of an art exhibition.

Party’s use of pastel, historically associated with feminine art and often dismissed as minor, becomes in his hands a tool of radical transformation. He exploits pastel’s unique materiality, its ability to create surfaces both matte and luminous, to produce striking visual effects. This rehabilitation of pastel fits into a broader reflection on artistic hierarchies and their relevance today.

Despite the gravity of some of his recent themes, Party’s art always retains a playful dimension, a pure joy in the act of painting that permeates his entire oeuvre. Perhaps this is his greatest talent: his ability to create art that is both deeply serious and delightfully accessible, that can speak of the end of the world with the colors of a carnival.

Because that’s what it’s all about: Nicolas Party creates art that allows us to face the gravest questions of our time while maintaining a childlike sense of wonder. His vibrant colors, bold compositions, and transformed spaces remind us that art can still surprise, move, and make us think, even in a world that sometimes seems to have lost its capacity for enchantment.

Reference(s)

Nicolas PARTY (1980)
First name: Nicolas
Last name: PARTY
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • Switzerland

Age: 45 years old (2025)

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