Born in 1964, Nicolas Schneider is a Strasbourg-based visual artist specializing in foundry, sculpture, watercolor and drawing. He is in charge of the foundry-molding workshop and the exhibition department at the Decorative Arts academy of Strasbourg. Nicolas Schneider has been assisting the artist Jean-Marc Bustamante since 1992.
Some of the works of Nicolas Schneider are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg and his work has also been showcased in France, Germany and Georgia.
His drawings, which he creates daily in dedicated notebooks, are the raw material for his work. They then pass through the filter of digital editing software to become abstract forms, retaining only the essence of the original drawing. These creations are then projected in large format. The resulting shapes are then reproduced and painted with watercolor, often in the monochrome palette characteristic of Nicolas Schneider's work.
In his sculptures, he brings out the volume and relief of his original drawings, manually.
Watercolor, and the use of water and dilution in general, play an important role in Nicolas Schneider's graphic and material production. His creations give an impression of floating, altered and liquefied forms and matter. This treatment of matter allows him to create objects or figures with blurred contours, sometimes sinister but always poetic. Water is thus both the subject and main material.
Nicolas Schneider's artistic practice is almost alchemical, combining drawing, pigments, water and raw materials in a veritable work of composition. For the artist, space, whether natural or urban, is a preferred source of inspiration. Nicolas Schneider thus produces authentic environments that call for contemplation as the fruit of an experience that could be described as fieldwork. The artist's walks, during which he executes many of his drawings, are thus a way for him to apprehend and appropriate space, which he abstractly renders throughout his work. To this extent, Nicolas Schneider's work is similar to that of a cartographer, where the curves and reliefs of the landscapes captured become fluid under the influence of water and matter.
The process in which Nicolas Schneider engages is thus one of visual dislocation, in which he allows the elements to escape his control. Images drawn, retouched and projected in this way, liquefied by watercolors, evaporated by glass and transparency, solidified by volume, lose their initial substance and emerge from reality as unsettling polymorphs.