Nicolas Bourthoumieux

Nicolas Bourthoumieux’ sculptural work plays with visual cues associated with the scientific validity of fundamental laws of physics and challenges them. Through straightforward and striking associations of shapes, volumes and textures, the artist seems to offer a poetic alternative to these laws, and ends up drafting his own metaphysics. His sculptures occupy and divide the space, refusing any negotiation with the surrounding architecture. Yet, when you get closer, the monumental and abstract qualities of the outer shapes give way to the tangible and delicate qualities of the apparent hand gestures. Here, the systematic, symmetrical and mathematical, are met with the sensible limits of craftsmanship.

While Bourthoumieux works with found and reused materials, his relationship with nature rests above all on an appreciation of laws of physics such as the interplay of forces, the passage of time and the spatial presence of an object. The artist extracts these observed phenomena from nature, highlights and explores them through abstraction and dichotomous relationships. His interventions are minimal, relying on simple processes of extraction, addition or welding, which in turn allows the materials to speak for themselves.

Bourthoumieux has shown his work in Belgium and internationally, including solo show at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris (2021), Ateliê Fidalga, Sao Pau (2018) and Galerie Catherine Bastide,  Brussels (2015). He regurlarly partakes in residencies internationally, including France, Portugal, Germany and Brazil. In 2017, he was awarded the price of Montrouge at the 62nd Salon de Montrouge.


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