Recently graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Cergy, Nicolas Bijakowski is currently exhibiting at the Maxime.D gallery, in the fourth arrondissement of Paris. If this event is far from being the first for him, he says he enjoys the sharing that is created each time between his “experiments on canvas” and the visitor.

 

“I consider myself more as a chemist than as a painter. My workshop is a laboratory, a place of experimentation ”underlines the young man of 24 years. And his creative materials prove it: here, no oil paint or acrylic, but different volatile powders, dark pigments and binders of all kinds that he spreads on the canvas. Nicolas Bijakowski insists, impossible to do a work entirely by himself if he wants to be satisfied with it. He prefers to “paint 40% of the work and leave 60% to chance”. Chance? It is the weather conditions, the rain, the heat, which put their mark on his work. “It's easier to love a painting when I know I'm not the only creator. "

 

From his teenage years, Nicolas Bijakowski embarked on street art and left his mark on the walls of disused buildings in Paris and its suburbs. It was in 2015 that he discovered canvas, a medium that immediately appealed to him: he could work flat, bringing reliefs to life without them being subjected to gravity. “With this technique, I become a cartographer: on strata sometimes black, sometimes white, I dig rhizomes which form a panoramic view of the sky. Monochromy, which one might think is sad, is a major part of the painter's work. He says he loves black, a warm and welcoming color that he uses to reflect his sensitivity.

 

“There are a lot of things I want to pass on to others. What I can't express, I paint. So, to focus his emotions, he works in total silence, for purity. Down to earth, he does not hesitate to destroy the myth of the cursed painter, feeling closer to the “CSP +, 9 am-5pm” rhythm. He is categorical: working at night is a waste of time.

 

And this lucidity pleases: Nicolas Bijakowski has already seduced the eye, among others, of the stylist Jean-Paul Gaultier. “All this sharing is what I'm looking for in making art. »His work is not intended to vegetate in the studio. They find their place on the buyer's walls: “this is where the work balances, above the sofa of an individual who has chosen to put it there. His last pieces are in fact in this spirit: the painter had the idea of deconstructing the canvas, like a puzzle. The idea is to sell a work made of different fragments, which the purchaser can hang in his own way, creating the balance himself: more than a simple purchase, it is a reappropriation of the painter's emotions.

 

“All this is possible thanks to the galleries, and the people who support me. Proof of this is the rise of the young prodigy whose first exhibition took place in his mother's medical office. Five years later, he signed contracts in Marseille and Brittany and exported all over the world: China, Australia, Reunion Island… A sharing that grows day by day and allows him to evoke his dream: “If I could do this all my life, i would be very happy. An experimental artist far from having finished his career, Nicolas Bijakowski still promises us great works to come ...