Nicolas Sassoon (French, b. 1981)is a Franco-Canadian artist who uses the visual language of early computer graphics, pixelated patterns and moiré effects, to create screen-based abstraction.,,GIFs are his favorite format,and he treats early computer imagery as an autonomous visual language that he puts in dialogue with the broader history of abstraction in painting, optical art and film.,
Sassoon grew up in coastal cities in the south of France and the Basque Country. He studied at an art school in Angoulême, earned a master's in new media in 2007, and moved to Vancouver, Canada, in early 2008.,In Vancouver he began releasing GIFs on a blog called You Make Me So Happy, originally as studies for sculpture and installation projects, and joined the collaborative group Computers Club after being introduced by the artist Laura Brothers.He went on to co-found the collaborative project SIGNALS.He also co-founded W-A-L-L-P-A-P-E-R-S with the artists Sara Ludy and Sylvain Sailly.,In 2011 the curator Lindsay Howard presented an installation of W-A-L-L-P-A-P-E-R-S by Sassoon and Ludy at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn, projecting their GIFs at large scale.
Much of his abstract work uses moiré patterning, overlapping two images in Photoshop to generate the illusion of a third, restricting himself to pixelated patterns and figures as his sole visual language.,,His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Eyebeam, the Hammer Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.,In 2020 Galerie Charlot in Paris presented his solo exhibition “Subterranea”, accompanied by a 52-page color booklet.
He began minting on Ethereum in February 2021 and on Tezos two months later, after the Brazil-based artist P1xelfool spent a day introducing him to the ecosystem. His series ISLANDS distilled four archetypal landscapes from the Gulf Islands off Vancouver's coast into a minimal eight-color palette, with soundscapes composed by the musician Yu Su.,Waterfalls, begun a decade earlier with six animations shown at the Centre d'Art Bastille in Grenoble, France, was expanded into a 100-animation collection for a 2022 exhibition with Bright Moments in London.In 2023 he collaborated with the fashion studio DRAUP on the piece Headpiece.At the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris he showed the sculpture series The Prophets in the group exhibition “En d'infinies variations”, pairing volcanic stone bases with LCD screens streaming pixelated animations of lava flows.At his 2025-26 exhibition “Iridescence” at Nguyen Wahed in London, he showed WAVES, a commission for Vancouver's Yaletown-Roundhouse Station that extended his study of moiré and optical interference.
