Nicolas Buffe’s work, at first glance, is not very serious. His imagination is inhabited by comic strip characters, icons of video games, and other animation stars: an imagination that refuses the “adult” world and turns its back on Contemporary Art’s current references. As if confirming this refusal, Buffe structures his ompositions with an ornamental repertory inherited from the Renaissance and 18th Centruy: cartouches, grotesques. With an astonishing virtuosity and irrefutable sense of humour, he combines the “High Culture” of the museum world and the “underground culture” of his youth.

But Buffe’s work isn’t by far only a postmodernist joke, or a decorative pastime. It is punctured by a much more profound question, which totally justifies his references to the Renaissance. This is the question of Artistic Inventiveness. Ever since the Romanticists, this has been confused with “inspiration” or “genius”: it is the manifestation of the creative gesture. For Nicolas Buffe, just as for the Renaissance artists, Invention is in fact a derivative of discovery and craftsmenship.

The inventor isn’t he who creates without a previous model thanks to his own genius; but in fact is the person who discovers in pre-existent works remarkable shapes, isolates them and creates new combinations from them.