Nicolas Vionnet

Lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland

Artist statement

In the work of Swiss artist Nicolas Vionnet, the familiar is never quite what it seems. A walking stick becomes a wheeled vehicle of absurd mobility; a sea container becomes an idyllic garden; a floor lamp merges with a walking frame; a floral canvas protests its own classification as painting; an exhaust box becomes a speaker box. These quiet yet charged gestures—often humorous, always precise—characterize a practice that walks a fine line between function and failure, curiosity and critique. Based in Zurich and working across painting, sculpture, installation, and public intervention, Vionnet constructs visual and in situ proposals that ask us to pause, reconsider, and look again. There is an intentional subtlety at play in his practice, one that resists immediacy in favor of slow unfolding. Rather than commanding attention, his works insert themselves into spaces—indoor, outdoor, institutional, or improvised—with the kind of soft defiance that often goes unnoticed until it gently irritates. For Vionnet, this moment of irritation is crucial: it destabilizes assumptions, encourages interpretation, and ultimately acts as an invitation rather than a demand. This is not spectacle, but speculation. His materials are often drawn from everyday life—preexisting objects, functional forms, industrial fabrics, the stuff of design and utility. Through precise alterations and unexpected pairings, these elements are made strange, rendered inoperative, or turned against themselves....

Artwork