20 x 20 cm

Mixed Media

Nicolas Vionnet employs gold not as a symbol of mere opulence, but as a charged, malleable material that leverages its cultural history to reflect on fragility, vulnerability, and the tension between the sacred and the profane. In his work, gold consistently functions as a catalyst for irony — it forces a confrontation between its ancient meanings of permanence and divinity and its current reality as a transient, distorted, or subverted medium.

Vionnet utilises the material's cultural significance to make central contemporary tensions visible in his works. In Changeover, he undermines the material’s economic prestige by choosing a gold-coloured emergency blanket, thus transforming the colour of wealth into a symbol of extreme human vulnerability — that of the chilled refugee. This contrasts the supposed permanence of gold with the fleeting, life-threatening danger of the sea.

He proceeds similarly in Holy Water: the religious gold of a monumental crucifix elevates the sacred, only to simultaneously subvert it through the profane reality of a dripping tap — a bitter satire on human ageing and incontinence. The golden surface thus draws even greater attention to the ultimately undignified vulnerability of the body.