Nicolas Tourre

Born in 1975 in Aubenas, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

Nicolas Tourre's works are concerned primarily with the things that make a painting, rather than painting's actual subjects. They expand the field of pictorial praxis well beyond the picture, informed as they are by a desire that is being forever reformulated to extract the image from the flatness that is supposedly its lot. This involves corrupting the medium in order to negotiate a narrow escape. Scratching the surface of a piece of wood thus becomes a way of upsetting the plane. This obsessive gesture turns the picture into a grotesque space, as the artist tries to scupper it in order to force it into an embodiment of itself. The pictorial – painterly – field is a battleground which makes its ruins the principles of a reformulation. When Tourre's works invade the floor, they have the same determination not to let themselves be crushed by the interplay of plane and representation. They thus mix elements and materials which are like so many stratagems of an overall redefinition of the work.