Buffe’s work, at first glance, is not very serious. His imagination is inhabited by comic strip characters and icons of video games. He structures his compositions with an ornamental repertory inherited from the Renaissance : grotesques, cartouches. But Buffe’s work isn’t by far only a postmodernist joke, or a decorative pastime. It is punctured by a much more profound question, that of Artistic Inventiveness. For him, just as for the Renaissance artists, Invention is in fact a derivative of discovery and craftmenship. The inventor isn’t he who creates without a previous model thanks to his own genius ; but in fact is the person who discovers in pre-existent works remarkable shapes, isolates them and creates new combinations from them. By adopting the grotesques as a background to his compositions, Nicolas Buffe has chosen a type of decoration based essentially on his subjective choices : grotesques are hybrids in which the most daring associations are permitted, if not recommended.

 

Nicolas Buffe's biography

"Un nouvel oeil ornemental de l'art", text by Christine Buci-Glucksmann (2009)

www.nicolasbuffe.com