Published by SKIRA PARIS. Text by Joachim Pissarro, Anaël Pigeat.
Published with Almine Rech Gallery.
French artist Alexandre Lenoir (born 1992) paints lush, mysterious landscapes on a grand scale, straddling the line between figuration and abstraction.
Lenoir paints lush, mysterious landscapes on a grand scale, with monumental canvases that straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. The artist works from personal photographs, which he reworks and projects onto his canvas. Over the years, he has developed a unique technique that consists in making the image appear on the canvas through a series of actions sometimes carried out over several months. In this process that he compares to photography, Alexandre Lenoir masks parts of the canvas with tape, then builds up layers of paint on top, which eventually impregnate the canvas through and around the masking tape. This means that the painter does not see what he is painting directly but relies on the "accidents" he orchestrates with the tape. It is when the tape is removed at the end of the process that the image is revealed. The results of this process are brightly colored paintings with a vaporous aesthetic, with a partially controlled figuration technique that leaves ample room for interpretation.
