Alexandre Lenoir's Chien et Loup
Photo: Charles Roussel
Artist to Watch: Alexandre Lenoir’s Bold New Works Explore the Power and Fallibility of Memory
Over a dozen color-saturated canvases from the rising star will go on view at Almine Rech in New York this September
Alexandre Lenoir, whose work will be on view at his Almine Rech exhibition in New York this fall. Photo: Charles Roussel
Debuting 15 dream, color-saturated canvases in the fall exhibit “Between Dogs and Wolves” (a French expression for twilight), which opens in September during the Armory Show, Alexandre Lenoir sees his new work as a milestone. “This show is Entre Chien et Loup is important to me because I haven’t really displayed my paintings since I started working with the gallery in March 2020,” says Lenoir, whose initial exhibitions with Almine Rech in Europe and New York were limited during the pandemic and his China show curtailed by travel restrictions.
With studios in Vitry-sur-Seine, near Paris, and Brooklyn, the artist uses family albums from his childhood in Guadeloupe and personal photos on his phone as source material to explore the power and fallibility of memory. Each piece is composed of 60 to 70 layers of paint and takes several months to complete. His unique process is all about relinquishing control to his assistants in both locales, who follow daily assignments through a system of protocols form the artist.
A work begins with a life-size pixelated Photoshop image projected onto his studio wall and a set of directives to guide the application of tape or pigment onto the canvas beneath it. In his Brooklyn studio, one such instruction sheet looks like a scientist’s lab notes with arrows and graphs laying out the relative water-to-paint ratio for each wash of a project in progress. Lenoir issues commands like “brush lightly, then firmly in this direction” or “dab off the remaining paint in this quadrant.” The artist, who counts Rudolf Stingel and Wade Guyton as key influences, says, “The result comes from my instructions, but the final artwork is out of my hands.”
Rest is Peace. Photo: Charles Roussel
Orange Room. Photo: Charles Roussel
Lenoir’s new work focuses on interiors, incorporating gold leaf and tape remnants for the first time to produce richly excavated abstractions. “I take a bit from my personal photographs. I take a bit from math,” he says. “I take a bit from my knowledge or my spirituality, and I mix everything to create a system for the painting to just appear.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Fall Issue in the “Artists to Watch” section. Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Alexandre Lenoir's Chien et Loup
Photo: Charles Roussel
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