This artist uses nails, gold, plants, and flowers to capture the ‘aura of Blackness’ | CNN

You might hear Alexis Peskine’s art studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, before you see it. On a good day, the syncopated clatter of hammers hitting nails falls in between the soulful rhythms of amapiano music or Stevie Wonder. These sounds float out of the open windows used to vent varnish fumes. When Peskine steps back from his work, physically exhausted, the constellation of nails coalesces into a Black face or body, the gold leaf plastered atop each nail catching light as skin would. Peskine is a multidisciplinary visual artist, a photographer and filmmaker but is best known for his mixed-media pieces. He hammers thousands of nails into wood — naturally dyed with mud, coffee, leaves, or flowers — to portray the faces of the African diaspora. “Ouro Verde,” Peskine’s most recent collection, means green gold in Portuguese and explores and honors traditional healing practices and African ancestral spirituality. “It’s more a pivot to go on celebrating us and being oblivious to White Supremacy,” said Peskine. “To see the beauty of our cultures, of our ancestral ways of healing.” Peskine is as multifaceted as his art practice. Born in France, his father is Fran