THE POWER, POTENTIAL, AND POSSIBILITIES OF WEB3
“I always have this sense that there’s a multiplicity of communities and ecosystems when we talk about culture and creative economies, and for the sake of my own curiosity and learning, I try to nurture connections with all these different ecosystems.”
French by birth, Nicolas Sassoon has adopted Canada as his home and dates the beginnings of his current art practice to his arrival in Vancouver in 2008. He was looking to break away from what he had learned in art school in France and, with just his laptop, embarked on a new creative journey.
“It’s a bit of a paradox because, at the time, I felt like I was giving up on art in some way to focus on something else, something different that was exciting me visually, and that was early computer graphics.”
While in school, Nicolas focused on new media, video, and interactivity, working with technicians on large-scale installations. He also learned a lot of different techniques around video and image editing software. Later, he decided to use this knowledge to explore precise imageries related to early computer graphics, specifically computer graphics from the mid-eighties and early nineties.
Growing up on the Atlantic coast in France, Nicolas always had an inclination for natural landscapes. In his work, he often tries to express these landscapes through pixelated abstractions. For him, this pixelated language represents a significant moment in art history, with deep connections to many other fields like abstraction in painting, textile arts, kinetic arts, and optical arts. His work is an opportunity to highlight these connections and create dialogues between these different fields of practice.
In February 2021, Nicolas minted his first NFT ‘Alone in the Sea’ on Foundation after being invited to SuperRare and Foundation in the Fall of 2020. It took him a few months from receiving those invitations to say ‘yes,’ as he felt very unfamiliar with the entire ecosystem and technology. And so, between October 2020 and February 2021, he educated himself on crypto and web3. After minting his first NFT, things started moving pretty quickly.
Nicolas remains eclectic in his creative practice, working regularly with galleries, museums, festivals, fashion brands, and startups, among others. Web3 has enabled him to be much more successful and financially sustainable, but he also appreciates the connections it has given him to so many incredible artists and builders. Above all, Nicolas remains open-minded and committed to continuous learning in web3, and beyond.
