Nicolás Paris

Nicolás Paris was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1977, where he lives and works. Before dedicating himself to art, he studied architecture and worked as both a teacher in rural Colombia and a baker. These formative experiences have shaped an interdisciplinary practice centred on drawing, learning, dialogue and collective forms of knowledge production. Through subtle yet meticulous interdisciplinary projects, Paris seeks to heighten awareness of everyday experience and encourage a more attentive interaction with our surroundings. His work is grounded in processes of comprehension and in the understanding of experience, approaching art as a means of learning, communicating and constructing knowledge collectively. Classroom structures and pedagogical strategies are central to his practice. Paris worked as a teacher in rural Colombia for several years, an experience that made him aware of the importance of reinterpretation and the creation of new meanings within educational processes. In his artistic projects, he transfers pedagogical methods to the exhibition context, encouraging open-ended, collaborative research with participant-viewers in laboratory-like environments. The exhibition space thereby becomes a site of egalitarian and communal exchange, where dialogue and experimentation contribute to the collective development of each project. Paris works across installations, drawings, objects, texts, workshops, happenings and video, as well as collaborative educational projects. Characterised by formal delicacy and restraint, these works function as tools for thought and communication. They use fundamental elements of art, architecture and education as a form of syntax or grammar from which alternative modes of learning and relating can emerge. For Paris, the artwork is neither an endpoint nor a definitive result, but a starting point and catalyst for an elusive, ephemeral and multifaceted experience.