Opening Reception | Alexandre Lenoir: Between dogs and wolves

In Alexandre Lenoir's solo exhibition, 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 color. 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.