Is it the contrasting decor of his childhood, the aligned houses, an industrial basin set in a natural landscape setting that has imbued Nelio’s artistic universe, whose work plays a symphony of nuances between formal minimalism and abstract expressionism, as an attempt to coexist, within an aesthetic discourse, ideas that appear to be antagonistic?
An iconoclastic apprenticeship.
Nelio’s iconoclastic research, freed from the academicism of artistic currents, is also based on the confrontation of two practices, two distinctive gestural expressions of the artist’s journey: graphic design and illustration, and their controlled and codified conception of lines, colors, and stylized figures on the one hand, and urban art in its spontaneous, dazzling, and unpredictable momentum on the other. These two practices Nelio has experienced autodidactically, through an empirical and intuitive learning process, nurtured by inspiring encounters and initiatic dialogues with other artists at the discretion of festivals, residencies, and travels. Among the opposites that animate Nelio’s work, perhaps there is a connection: the freedom of drawing that has always accompanied the emerging artist, as a parallel language for capturing nuances that words sometimes smooth out and reduce.
On both sides of the art venues.
At 25 years old, Nelio settled in Lyon and co-founded a structure intended to create bridges between graphic design and art: both a screen printing workshop and a cultural venue. He creates, imagines, designs, and also learns about exhibition scenography as a curator, confronting his own learning with that from other aesthetic perspectives. This is a way of opening the doors between the street and the gallery, democratizing art and making it accessible to everyone. This point of connection does not prevent Nelio from continuing to practice art in public space, in the vandalistic spirit that stimulates the immediacy of creative gesture.
The audacity of art inspired by architectural topologies.
A long journey through Australia, punctuated by decisive encounters, convinces Nelio to turn towards pure creation, towards Art with a capital A. Or the audacity to move from what he defines as an artisan craft to the unknown and unpredictable of the creative momentum. Starting in 2011, Nelio continues his path as an artist, realizing mural paintings on invitation from institutions and festivals on different continents, in various major cities around the world where he has left his mark. His work plays with the codes of urban practice to deploy a unique formal universe of compositions that interweave the style of illustration, notably around architecture, with references to art history that give a remarkable aesthetic depth to his work. His abstract mural works seem to blend into their architectural and landscape environment, opening up the horizon of the imagination for passersby. For Nelio, a mural work must necessarily be conceived « in situ », as a projection of the geometry into which it is inserted, in echo with the supporting space. The visual depth of the works summons the viewer’s gaze, who literally penetrates the work. A graphic design of shapes and colors that associates the constructed and the dream as stylized phantasmagoric settings. The artist deconstructs cities through his painting, offering spaces of escape beyond the walls of concrete. In these series of works that extend architectural ensembles with an eerie perspective, the influences of constructivism, Suprematism or Cubism, among other abstract art movements, intersect with purity. Nelio then discovers that his artist name means square in Finnish, which reinforces his quest to explore Malevich’s reflections on the possibilities of the square as a generic form, decomposed, diffracted, and with infinite possible reconfigurations.
Nelio’s work combines minimalist purity and expressionist density.
The evolution of Nelio’s work towards the studio and canvas is evident in his compositions, which are perceived as entities of fragments associated in a play of perspectives creating a dynamic movement of becoming equilibrium, unfolding time-space that transforms into a nonlinear dialectic. The ephemeral and the unpredictable nature of the evolution of a mural work have been able to stimulate his creative process on canvas. Nelio’s work now lies on an instinctive crest line between pure minimalism and saturated density, between conceptual art and abstract expressionism, defying boundaries and classifications. Nelio defines his search for abstraction as a way to move from form to the immaterial, from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex, indescribable. This research presupposes a creative impetus unleashed in an unstable movement where spontaneity acts as a barrier to confinement, allowing the surprise of the unexpected, the random and the unfinished to emerge. The evolution in the studio is also a trajectory of liberation from the egocentrism of the graffitist, who, in his omnipotence, marks a territory with his unique typography to approach the art of humble posture through a more universal dimension. Nelio wanders the museums he discovers during his travels and summons the references that inspire him in his works, as a way to find a place to belong in the history of this shared artistic world.
Evolutionary series to explore the nuances of abstraction.
Nelio works extensively in series to try to reconcile the two directions of minimalism and abstract expressionism, or the infinitely distant and the intimate interiority. On the one hand, there is a structural approach, with its refined forms, the flat colors and the lines inspired by architectural rhythms; on the other hand, there are dense, complex and introspective compositions that explore the unconscious undercurrents in organic and colorful forms, playing with the effects of accumulations. Nelio constantly oscillates between these two poles, yet he seeks to make them coexist through the creation of intermediate pieces that introduce a link, in the long-term development of evolving series that reveal the nuances of the transition from one approach to another, an attempt to overcome the contradictions through figures freed from the identifiable. The scenography of the presentation of the works is particularly important for Nelio, who, from his own experience as a curator, perceives it as a possible path between antagonistic works, subtly guiding the viewer through the nuances that the invisible link between the different ways of representing the world can take on. Nelio considers that each of his exhibitions should be read as the chapter of a work in progress, the chapter of a story in the making, never fixed in apparent determinisms.
2208241946, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
Unique work, signed
H80 x L60 cm
An emerging aesthetic research.
An inquiry by the artist: to prioritize expressionism in the work on canvases that allows this process of densification over time, and to continue the minimalist research through the in-situ wall projects as well as the bas-reliefs and sculptures that bring a new dimension to the purist lines? The volumes of the sculpture provide an additional perspective to this work on abstract form, blending the interplay of colors, the topology of the reliefs, and the effects of matter. In the same spirit, Nelio wishes to engage the evolution of his outdoor practice towards Land Art, an approach that proves particularly stimulating for playing with natural geography by incorporating his abstract compositions into it.
The creative temporality between instinct and slow reflection.
As his studio work develops, Nelio questions the temporality of creation that is constantly redefining itself. The approach can be quick and instinctive, or it can take the form of the artist’s one-on-one interaction with the canvas, whose finality remains undefined. The canvas opens up the potential for a density of layers imbued with multiple interventions, and today Nelio takes the liberty of employing this same treatment, even on minimalist-looking canvases, to focus on the details that illuminate the field of meaning of a plurality open to interpretation.
Suggest rather than demonstrate.
Nelio works with the aim of revealing to the viewers works open to the diversity of meanings, each projection being unique. He does not give too many clues to interpretation; he does not lock things down in explanations but rather opens up the horizons of thought. The titles of his creations echo this principle. Often, these titles are composed of numbers that appear to be precisely indecipherable but for the artist are a reference point that anchors the work in temporal coordinates: year, month, day, hour and minute. Instead of words, these numbers are used to avoid saying what painting says, but to connect it to the reality of the creative act. Sometimes, however, a choice of words, phrases: poetic words, political words, drawn from philosophical inspirations or lexical research, provide clues that open up all possible paths of thought.
2209161744, 2022
Acrylic on wood assembly
Unique work, signed
H30 x L21 x 3 cm
2209202146, 2022
Acrylic on wood assembly
Unique work, signed
H30 x L21 x 2.5 cm
Inspiration to dare the unusual.
Becoming an artist, coming from graphic design, means working on building self-confidence, overcoming the inevitable question of one’s own legitimacy, and breaking free from the mastery and balance that prevail in craftsmanship to embrace the surprise of the unexpected. Previously, Nelio worked extensively using drawings, sketches, color tests, and layouts in a perfectionist approach, knowing in advance what the final result would be. But Art is not a matter of execution; there is a romantic dimension that intrudes uninvitedly into the genesis of a work. Dare to use techniques that are counterproductive; to push the boundaries and disrupt: the artist moves away from the pre-determined paths that lead to boredom. Nelio discovers new tools and processes while renovating, since a few years ago, a ruin at the heart of the Ardèche. This eminently physical work inspires him in his artistic approach: he transforms the process so that technique never takes control over creation, in order to escape the paralyzing determinisms and allow the unpredictable desire to emerge, the energy that liberates creation.
Nelio’s world is colorful with all the nuances of the ambivalence that permeates our relationship with the world; of those paradoxes that are the salt of life; of the complexity of desire, of the contradictions that set us in motion. Nelio’s world is dense with pictorial questions that never run out of new perspectives. It is open to perspectives that are always renewed by our gaze.
