Nicolas Boulard, Specific Cheeses — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Thursday, March 12, 2015 7 PM → 9 PM

The cycle meetings titled Cheese Theories proposes taking a look at cheese from different theoretical angles. Production processes, conservation methods, technical limitations of an unstable product, study of the influence of forms on the perception of taste, analysis of the bacteriological environment in production methods, and etymology and place names of products. Historians, artists, scientists, writers and researchers will all come and introduce their works and research to do with cheese and its many different forms as part of this first cycle of meetings, brainchild of Nicolas Boulard.

It is in the terroir or the ‘soil’ of local places that Nicolas Boulard finds the sources of his artistic work, where what is usually involved is changes of matter and resurgences of forms. After producing a set of pieces which, by dint of chemical transformations, explore and appropriate the rules, procedures and know-how that govern the wine-growing sector, since 2010 he has been at work on nothing less than an aesthetic revolution within the world of cheese. At the root of this new area of interest lies the observation of a formal proximity between the forms of cheeses and the forms of minimal Art, underpinned by a lecture given by the artist which inaugurates the Specific Cheeses project.

Specific Cheeses

The word ‘form’ and the French word fromage (cheese) come from the same etymological family, just like the similar forms of cheeses and the recurrent forms of Minimal Art (circle, square and pyramid). Starting from this finding, 12 cheese moulds have been made using Sol LeWitt drawings : 12 Forms Derived from a Cube (1982).

“The essential quality of geometric forms comes from the fact that they are not organic, unlike any other so-called artistic form”.

Donald Judd, interview with Lucy Lippard, 1967.