ABC n°5, 2018

Nicolas Cessieux  

Born in 1986, Nicolas Cessieux is a French designer and visual artist.

He started graffiti in 2005, in the midst of the explosion of the Street Art movement, and took the pseudonym Futon. In parallel with his many nocturnal paintings, he tried his hand at a multitude of plastic disciplines specific to Urban Art, such as stickers, stencils and collages, which can be found in many of his works.

Although graffiti is intended to be a form of expression free from all constraints and systems, this discipline does indeed respond to codes and it is on the diversion of these implicit rules that Nicolas' first works are based.

Like advertising for brands, the number of graffiti done, their size and their visibility make the reputation of a graffiti artist. In the tradition of JonOne, Nicolas pushes logic to the extreme by creating accumulations of tags, drawn by the thousands with ballpoint pen, brush, spray paint or dripping. In his works, hundreds of signatures pile up, intersect, overlap creating a new material close to abstraction, visually close to the achievements of Jackson Pollock or Pierre Soulages.

More recently, graphic design and illustrations have been incorporated into his digital compositions, screen prints and paintings. Japanese pop culture, graffiti, logos, graphic patterns and monsters of all kinds are mixed in works recalling the influence of the 123 Klan or the Superflat contemporary art movement.

Nicolas Cessieux's paintings and drawings have been the subject of individual and group exhibitions in France since 2013.