Josué Nicolas

War and Poetry.

Josué NICOLAS invites us to travel through time in each of his paintings. Working in watercolor, colored pencils and oil paint, he thus makes each work an open window on a medieval past where we find knights and cathedrals, horses helmeted with muzzles, ragged villagers and soldiers walking towards a castle, lush nature, forest animals, falcons and dragons. A whole medieval universe to which this medieval lover gives life thanks to the transparent lightness of watercolor and the freshness of colored pencil. He therefore immerses us in a daily life that he likes to imagine, where the greatest savagery mixes with moments of grace and pastoral poetry, like this knight lying at the foot of a flowering tree, dressed in his rib of mesh and its armour, and which seems to have lengthened for a moment, tasting the springtime softness of the grass and letting its gaze lose itself in the sky under the protection of a hedgehog which fixes us with its round eyes. A way perhaps for him to rehabilitate a historical period long considered barbaric, and of which he strives to reveal to us all the violence, but also an unsuspected sweetness.

Developer and web graphic designer by profession, it was by copying video game jackets and manga covers that Josué NICOLAS learned about drawing. A fictional universe that he finds in these historical and fantasized dives and also knows how to adapt it to other authors to illustrate children's books, collections of poems or theatrical tales.

Generous as much as passionate, Josué NICOLAS therefore offers us, for the time of a work, to immerse ourselves in those times whose barbarism was only equaled by magic and poetry.

Bertrand Navin