Nicolas Barrome-Forgues: Popcorn dans les veines

This exhibition marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, coinciding with his first institutional show in Normandy and the publication of his monograph Vidéoclub. A key milestone — part reflection, part celebration — it looks back on fifteen years of creation: a moment of introspection and a deep dive into the foundations of his imaginary world.

Barrome-Forgues’s childhood in the Basque Country was steeped in the fantastical and adventure films stocked in the video rental store his mother ran in Biarritz in the 1980s. King Kong, E.T., Roger Rabbit, The Goonies — these modern mythologies have since become the raw material of his visual language.

With this show, we dive into the work of Nicolas Barrome-Forgues, who blurs the boundaries between classical painting and pop culture with technical virtuosity and a distinctive flair for composition and storytelling. His surreal, hybrid creatures shape a universe that Michel Lagarde once aptly described as a “joyful mess of extraterrestrials.”

Between muralism and studio painting, Barrome-Forgues has developed an immediately recognizable visual language, fed by playful appropriations of familiar visual objects: educational posters, vintage postcards, old films, reimagined still lifes. In his work, we find a spirit of play, humor, tenderness — and darkness too — sustained by a tension between control and exuberance.

His practice spans digital painting, acrylic, and graphite drawing, yet always remains grounded in a meticulous attention to detail and a unique pursuit of harmony, even in dissonance. The presence of Arcimboldo, hovering in the background, becomes something like an unconscious totem.

The exhibition includes a series of collaborative works with master artisans — Bertrand Charlot (resin), Les Philanthropes (textiles), Alexis Dandréis (neon), and Élodie Loyer (ceramics) — where each collaboration becomes a vector for expansion, revealing the many forms of an imagination in motion.

As Speedy Graphito put it: “Nicolas has popcorn juice in his veins and stars in his eyes.” And that’s exactly what this exhibition invites us to see.