Nicolas Neyman

Nicolas Neyman grew up between the drawings of “Snoopy et les Peanuts”, Charles Schulz, those of “Petit Nicolas”, Jean-Jacques Sempé, and the painting of Paul Colin (La Revue Nègre, with Joséphine Baker, Le Tumultte Noir …), Of which his mother was the student in the late 1960s. If Nicolas remembers having always drawn, the pictorial revelation arrived in adolescence, with the discoveries of Edgar Degas and Egon Schiele. The shape and color of the first, the freedom of the line and the power of the second. It was to "play Degas" that Nicolas chooses pastel. In parallel with his learning of the living model, he began to copy a drawing of the master every day for several years. Objectives & nbsp;: Learn to look, learn to compose, learn to draw. Pastel strength lies, a priori, in color. In Nicolas' drawings, she is therefore elsewhere. By almost working only black, it diverts the medium from its primary power, reduces its palette to the maximum and, paradoxically, by removing color, brings to the pastel strength and modernity. Ultimate paradox & nbsp;: by approaching photography, Nicolas' drawings remain very far from any form of hyperrealism. The figurative is form. The form is abstract. Then forget the black of the drawing, look at the whites that form. And if, ultimately, these faces, these bodies, were not so far from abstraction & nbsp;?