LAUREATE CARRÉ SUR SEINE | FDD Interconstruction 2023

The Carré sur Seine 2022 prize was awarded to Nils Vandevenne "for the relevance of his work, his constant experimentation where brutality and finesse meet, for the renewed dialogue between tool, material and object, capable of revealing the hidden layers and ancient histories of things. Nils gives us powerful works to see ".

Rather than painting, Nils Vandevenne seeks to de-paint, to remove the material from the surface of the painting. This gesture of alteration leaves only a thin layer of paint: a form in negative. The color is torn away by the tool, the materials resurface and enter into dialogue and confrontation with the object's last state of life, a process that acts like a revelation. When the surface is altered, all the stratifications of the object's former life emerge. It's an animal, instinctive gesture. The artist digs, searches, and ultimately recovers a material history of the life of the support, or of what it was.

Nils Vandevenne was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1995. He graduated from the Villa Arson and the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris in 2021. He lives and works in Paris. Winner of the French Ministry of Culture's CAMUS Paris, ville jardin project in duo with Rayan Yasmineh, he was resident at Hangar Y in Meudon in 2022 and at the Fonds de Dotation encore! in La Rochelle in 2023. With Bryce Delplanque, he presented his work as part of the exhibition Sous sur face, curated by Anne-Laure Peressin in 2023.

A garden square
- finalist exhibition of the Carré sur Seine 2023 Prize, from March 14 to April 27, 2024 -

Removing matter from the painting's surface to reveal its form and history. Nils Vandevenne's approach is that of depicting, removing color and material from the medium of creation. His gesture of alteration acts as a kind of revelation, revealing the strata of the object's former life. This process, almost instinctive and animal-like, consists in exploring, examining and rediscovering the material memory of the support, often resulting in geometric compositions such as a grid, a circle, a line, or exploded compositions as in a narrative of destruction for a new understanding.