Nicolas Depetris is a French painter, engraver, videographer, and architect based between the French Riviera and Fukuoka, Japan.
Born in Nice in 1984, he graduated from the Paris-Belleville National School of Architecture in 2015.
Trained by painter and engraver Jean-Baptiste Sécheret from 2006 to 2013, Depetris has exhibited his works in Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Monaco since his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2014.
His most recent solo show took place in Tokyo in April 2024.
Depetris’s work explores the relationship between human beings and landscape, where architecture emerges as a human trace — a physical and historical sediment shaping the composition of the natural world.
His paintings reveal the force of landscapes marked, altered, or redefined by human presence. Between 2015 and 2017, Depetris lived in Fukuoka, in southern Japan, where he studied the relationship between the city and its surrounding nature. This experience deepened his reflection on the notion of contemporary landscape and fragmented territories, particularly in coastal cities where mountains and sea converge.
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. This 38-day journey, completed without flying, offered him a unique perspective on territorial continuity and socio-cultural contrasts — from the vast emptiness of the Mongolian steppe to the density of East Asian metropolises.
Depetris is currently developing two new painting series: one extending his research on industrial landscapes from Kita Kyushu to the urban structures of Manhattan, and another that deepens his connection with Japanese culture through still lifes exploring the symbolism of the skull.
