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.
