Nicolas Depetris (b. 1984, Nice) is a French painter and engraver whose work examines contemporary landscape as a site of human inscription, where architecture appears as trace, sediment, and memory within nature.
Based between the French Riviera and Fukuoka, Japan, he develops pictorial spaces shaped by tension: mountain and sea, infrastructure and wilderness, density and emptiness. Depetris graduated from the Paris-Belleville National School of Architecture (ENSAPB) in 2015.
From 2006 to 2013, he trained with painter and engraver Jean-Baptiste Sécheret, an experience that grounded his practice in direct observation and a rigorous approach to composition, tone, and atmosphere.
Since his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2014, he has exhibited in Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Monaco.
His most recent solo exhibition took place in Tokyo in April 2024.
Living in Fukuoka between 2015 and 2017, Depetris focused on coastal territories where urban development meets steep topography, an environment that sharpened his interest in fragmented geographies and the way cities “compose” the natural world.
In 2018, while based in Berlin, he travelled from Nice to Fukuoka by train with artist Chikako Kiyohara, crossing France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, China, and Japan.
The 38-day journey, completed without flying, offered a heightened sense of territorial continuity and socio-cultural contrast.
He is currently developing new bodies of work that extend his research on industrial and urban landscapes, from Kitakyushu to the structures of Manhattan, alongside a series of still lifes exploring the skull motif in dialogue with Japanese masks.
