ALEXANDRE LENOIR

In Alexandre Lenoir’s solo exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in New York, the top left corner of one of his canvases contains the enigmatic and alluring phrase ‘Tape the sky at the beginning.’ Direct and instructional, yet profound and poetic, this phrase illuminates the crux of Lenoir’s distinctive artistic process and its rigorous, conceptual, physical, and metaphysical underpinnings. First and foremost, the phrase refers to Lenoir’s signature method of trapping paint beneath masking tape to replicate nature, represent an image, and, as displayed in the works in the exhibition, showcase his continued experimentation with material and colour. The lyrical scrawl also offers insight into Lenoir’s studio practice, a crucial conceptual element of his work. Indeed, the text was written as a direct ‘instruction’ to a studio assistant. These instructions are part of what the artist calls his ‘protocol’ or ‘recipe’ for a painting. Lenoir’s meticulous protocols appear in the form of charts for studio assistants and speak to his own removal (his own absence) from the process of painting in search of an image steered by chance, one that he himself could not make, or rather decided not to make since he literally stood out. But here is the inherent in this protocol: while standing out, the artists becomes outstanding in his own absence. The artist shines through his own absence. He reveals himself though his own self-removal. Likening the artist to a conductor or architect, Lenoir draws on the formal and conceptual strategies of pioneering avant-garde artistic movements across the art historical canon, ranging from Les Nabis to Fluxus. The works in the exhibition also conjure the presence of Andy Warhol and Alighiero Boetti in Lenoir’s conceptual, or indeed metaphysical, studio practice. Lenoir’s practice can be called ‘metaphysical’ in the simple sense of ‘meta-physics’—meta: after or beyond; physics: nature, presence. Insofar as Lenoir takes his own self, his own presence, away from making the work, his role is indeed meta-physical, or beyond-the-physical. As we loiter at the beginning, let us tape the sky and cross the threshold into Alexandre Lenoir’s pictorial world.

The nearly twenty large-scale works on view in Alexandre Lenoir’s exhibition, Entre chien et loup, in Almine Rech’s Tribeca space reveal an unparalleled degree of experimentation in the Parisian-born artist’s practice to date. These pictorial triumphs reflect the intensive layering techniques, underpinning Lenoir’s singular vision since he graduated with honours from the legendary Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2016. To create these works, Lenoir projected black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs, primarily of interior spaces, onto the canvas, following each image with brilliant, meditative, gradual deposits of pigment with his signature material—masking tape. For the first time in his practice, Lenoir has opted for a different colour masking tape in some works, exchanging his trademark painter’s blue for yellow and orange.

The exhibition also includes the artist’s first-ever canvas glued onto aluminium panel, which straddles the spheres of two-dimensional images and installation artworks. In the paintings overall, Lenoir’s treatment of paint—a rarely encountered combination of oil and acrylic (which feels like oil and water)—is more luminous and translucent than ever before. Light appears to emanate from within the works from a hidden luminous source—a symptom of his more prolific use of white across these surfaces. While maintaining intense colour alchemies, the effect is refined with delicate gradations in hue as well as a mesmerising, aqueous drift between tones.