Plaster – gold leaf, 10.5 x 4 cm
Work acquired in 2017

Born in 1976 in Reims, Nicolas Boulard lives and works in Paris.

Nicolas Boulard’s artistic practice takes its inspiration from two registers of important references, which he puts to innovative use in his work. While he is deeply influenced by the history of modern art on the one hand, particularly American art from the 1960s and 1970s, his work is also strongly anchored in the sphere of the land. Long interested in the world of wine—which is very familiar to him, having grown up in a Champagne producing family—and having subverted its rules and conventions, both the manufacturing processes and the French certification system, Boulard turned his attention to the world of cheese in 2010. Sparking this interest was his observation of the formal proximity that exists between the shapes of cheese and certain recurring figures in minimal art. In his performative project Specific Cheeses, Boulard was inspired, for example, by Sol Lewitt’s 12 Forms Derived from a Cube (1982). In this context, he regularly has cheeses made based on their models, in turn based on the ancestral knowledge of local producers.

Golden Cheese – Camembert (2017) is a plaster sculpture covered with gold leaf with the dimensions of a Camembert de Normandie – a cheese protected in France by a specific certification. As is often the case in his work, Boulard transforms matter and mixes registers with irony, reaffirming the porosity that exists between recognized forms of cultural expression and more vernacular or popular forms. The use of plaster appears as a dual reference to the constitution of the camembert and to the material of the sculpture, which the gold leaf enhances and adds a certain air of nobility.