Bogota, Colombia, 1977
Lives and works in Bogota, Colombia
With his subtle yet meticulous interdisciplinary projects, Nicolás Paris generates a heightened awareness of the everyday, an intensified interaction with surrounding environments, and an enhanced sense that art is rooted the experience of understanding as well as an understanding of experience.
Central to Paris’s practice is the role of classroom structures and pedagogical strategies. Paris worked as a schoolteacher in rural Colombia for a number of years before dedicating himself to art, which allowed him to become aware of the importance systems of resignification that are fundamental to the educational process. This has become a major focus of his artistic projects, in which he employs pedagogical tactics within the exhibition context in order to encourage collaborative, open-ended research with participant-spectators in laboratory-like environments. In the process, Paris converts the exhibition space into a locus of egalitarian, communal and investigative exchange and dialogue, centered around the collective development of specific art projects.
Paris’s installations, drawings, objects, workshops/happenings and videos, as well as his collaborative pedagogical projects, are characterized by delicacy and quietness. They function as visual aids, employing the basic elements of art, architecture and education as a kind of syntax and grammar from which to develop further means of communication; for Paris, the medium of art is not an end-result, but rather a starting point and catalyst for a more elusive, ephemeral and polyvalent experience.
