Nicolas Depetris is a painter, engraver, videographer and architect based in the French Riviera and Fukuoka, Japan.
Born in Nice in 1984, he graduated in 2015 from the Paris-Belleville National School of Architecture. Trained by painter and engraver Jean-Baptiste Sécheret, from 2006 to 2013, Depetris exhibited his paintings in Japan, France, UK, Germany and Monaco, since his first personal exhibition in Paris in 2014. The main topic of his art work is the relationship between Human beings and Landscape.
He spent 700 days in Fukuoka, Japan and 30 months in Berlin, Germany.
In his paintings the architecture is expressed as “Human track’’ which redefine the landscape’s composition by physical and historical sedimentation. His paintings reveal the force of the landscape, sometimes altered or marked by human presence. Between 2015 and 2017, Depetris lived in Fukuoka in southern Japan, where he travelled and analyzed Japanese cities and their surrounding landscapes. This experience enriched his point of view as an architect, allowing him to work on the concept of contemporary landscape: industrial harbours, pieces of cities, natural landscapes suggesting human presence, to understand the nature and the manifestations of human settlement in landscape and territory. Depetris is interested in heterogeneous and fragmented territories, such as Fukuoka, a maritime city surrounded by mountains. Here, the sea takes on different colors, in a changing and metallic atmosphere.
France to Japan by train
In 2018, Depetris travelled from his hometown in Nice, to his wife's hometown in Fukuoka, by train, using no flight.
This 38-day trip through France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, China and Japan allowed him to see a reality invisible from the plane: a territorial continuity and important socio-cultural contrasts, from the vast desert spaces of Mongolia to the hyper density of Chinese megacities.
