Coun. Libera l’art

The Coun exhibition. Libera l’art at the Palais Lascaris illustrates the desire to make dialogue between the Baroque and the popular soul of Nice. Since 2024, artist Coun. has been accompanying the Lascaris Palace in an approach to mediation by the image. As a training designer, this cartoonist on the asserted line has been able to appropriate the local codes to design the various educational booklets of the museum. His work is not only illustrative: he translates, with modern clarity and sensitivity, the profusion of mythological ceilings and the rigor of baroque architecture.

With Libera l’art, the artist takes a new step. Its aesthetic, inherited from the thickness of the design, nourished by the popular culture and its sharp humour, creates a striking contrast with the ornamentation of the Palace. By liberating the line, Coun. also releases our gaze on the collections and reflects with clarity the richness of the Palace's ceilings and decorations. Coun. thus transforms history into a visual language accessible to all, making the museum a space of play and discovery.

This exhibition is an invitation to rediscover the Lascaris Palace through the new eye, proving that heritage is a living matter, constantly reinvented by the talent of those who look at it.

Raising the soul of Carnival

The exhibition highlights a forgotten technique: glued and moulded paper. Herrity of the first niçois carnival trees, it consists of mixing glue, flour and cartons. By drawing on this know-how associated with the party and the satire, Coun. anchors his work in the material continuity of the niçoise identity. The sculptural plastic qualities of the paper extend the drawing in space and make body with the architecture of the Palace. The characteristic lines of its graphic universe are thus deployed in space, giving rise to forms with asserted contours and frank colors. The formal simplification and energy of the trait produce immediately identifiable figures: the Coun style.
By introducing popular and contemporary motifs in the Baroque frescoes, Coun. reactivates the original function of this decor: seduce, impress and tell. Lascaris Palace is not only a conservatory; it becomes a raw material, a place of production capable of welcoming new stories

The artist

Born in Nice in 1987, Coun. unfolds a singular universe where incisive humor meets rigorous plastic research. Designed in Turin, he trained his weapons in a discipline of impact and synthesis. His works, between the clear line and the volume, crystallize the issues of his research, keeping from his past as a designer the requirement of the streak and an attachment to the “handmade”.