Nicolas Lebrun was born in 1985 in Carpentras (France). A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, he has lived and worked in this city since his studies.

After an initial period (2009-2015) dedicated to interactive installations questioning materiality and the artwork/viewer relationship, his practice evolved towards systematic series based on the use of rigorous creative protocols. These protocols allow his programs to exist as autonomous and accessible creations, deploying in protean forms: digital/global, physical/local, or hybrid.

His work primarily explores human perception of space and techniques for representing depth on a two-dimensional plane. Through drawing as a means of formal research, he develops a recurring lexicon: stacked cubes evoking Suprematist compositions, wireframe renderings with a retro aesthetic, polygonal entanglements. This apparent formal economy becomes the ground for constant reinvention of alteration processes.

Each project functions as a system endowed with an initial state and a transformation process that ultimately freezes the composition. These mutations take on an ambivalent aspect: they alter to construct or destroy, sometimes creating something new through destruction itself. This interest in the alteration of a composition echoes our relationship to images and reality in the contemporary media space. Thus, each of his experiments and each variation it produces can be considered as a viewpoint, a perception, or a deformation of reality. This transformation of the image evokes a decomposition or multiplication of a more global reality—that of science, society, or history. Sometimes, the compositions are themselves stratifications, layers where multiple processes operate simultaneously, creating juxtapositions of forms, an amalgam of different perceptions. The artist thus places the viewer in a tension between multiple viewpoints that participate in deconstructing reality, making it diverge.

His research deepens the question of interdependent relationships between elements: how does a form define itself through its relation to others, how do structural constraints generate new expressive possibilities? His projects explore phenomena of superposition, entanglement, and passage, where each element exists only through and within its relation to the whole. By multiplying layers and perspectives within a single composition, his work reflects the contemporary condition of the image: this accumulation of representations that overlap, contradict each other, and end up constituting a screen as much as a window onto reality. His works thus testify to the growing difficulty of discerning a stable reality beneath the continuous flow of interpretations.

I have, for about twenty years, produced with great obstinacy systematic works whose line of conduct has been to reduce my arbitrary decisions to a minimum. In order to limit my sensitivity as an ‘Artist’ I have suppressed composition, removed all interest in execution, and rigorously applied simple and obvious systems which can develop, either through actual chance or through the participation of the viewer.

– François Morellet, Du spectateur au spectateur ou l’art de déballer son pique-nique, 1971.