Nicolas Dali was featured in one article from Bangkok Post 2 months ago, you can learn more about him there:
SGT PIPO'S BUSY AUDIO-VISUAL WORLD
Nicolas Dali works in many media, from animation to music
Nicolas Dali is a designer who works across a range of disciplines, including illustration, web design, animation, print, motion graphics and VJ-ing.
Because sound is as interesting to him as visuals, he enjoys working in a medium where the two meet, and this has led to him live VJ-ing and creating motion graphics to accompany live rock bands or DJs.
POPSCENE from NEMOSTUDIO on Vimeo.
"I really like VJ-ing because I'm basically a musician playing with graphics and music, two of my favourite things together. Image without sound seems a bit lacking, but combined it can be very powerful."
Mr Dali grew up in a small town close to Aix-en-Provence in the south of France before heading off to university in Marseilles to study visual communications. His grandfather was Arabic, hence his surname, but there's no relation to the famous painter Salvador Dali, at least as far as he knows.
"After studying I wanted to see what happened overseas. My girlfriend is a French teacher, so it was quite an obvious choice to go abroad, so we decided to travel to Hungary. It was quite simple really." From Hungary the couple travelled to and lived in Malaysia, and then to their present home, Bangkok.
Mr Dali's graphics and motion visuals tend to borrow the visual language and style of the 1920s, as well as communist aesthetics, but always adding a modern twist. A good example of this is the Penang illustration that depicts a woman staring proudly into the distance, with all the strong lines and shapes often seen in the Constructivist movement in Russia.
"This illustration was made for the 50th anniversary of the independence of Malaysia. It's not a complex concept at all. In Penang there are a lot of Chinese people, as well as Indians and Malays, so I wanted to show all the different cultures through the different newspaper texts on the clothes, the Borneo rose [bunga terung] in the background, and small motifs like monkeys and elephants."
He is currently working with the French Maison PoaPlume collective to create an updated almanac, complete with classic 1920s-style commercial graphics with a modern twist, for which he'll be creating the cover and fake ads.
"'Almanac' was the name of an old book where you could find information on astrology, even comic strips, and this was the inspiration for us to make our own."
His animations, on the other hand, have a completely different feeling - these at first appear quite cute and childlike, but there is definitely a touch of darkness lurking in the background. One such handmade animation is called Le Corbo et Le Renard (The Crow and the Fox), inspired by Jean de la Fontaine's fable, that shows a crow who aspires to become a Moulin Rouge singer after the fox flatters the crow in order to distract him while stealing a gramophone.
MTV MID from NEMOSTUDIO on Vimeo.
Another relatively new character is "Sergent Pipo", an alter ego of the illustrator himself, again inspired by his love of music. Sergent Pipo is modelled on the characters portrayed by the Beatles for their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Like most musicians, Pipo has a MySpace page, which has gained quite a reputation, through which Mr Dali has received much attention and many commissions.
Visit http://myspace.com/sergentpipo and http://www.nemostudio.fr.
Tintin Cooper
