Alexandre Lenoir. Par la force des choses

Alexandre Lenoir, born in 1992, mainly paints landscapes traversed by often ghostly figures, indifferent to the viewer. His paintings are executed from photographs that he chooses as memories of happy moments, though dominated by an imperious nature to which he leaves an element of arbitrariness. Rather than faithfully representing nature, he seeks an alchemy that gives rise to works that seem to have been created spontaneously, almost without the artist's intervention. From these familiar scenes bathed in brilliant light emanates a surprising melancholy. On the occasion of the 16th contemporary counterpoint at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Alexandre Lenoir presents four new canvases. Lenoir works from instructions he gives to himself or to non-painter assistants, on images transformed by time, both the time elapsed between the taking of the photograph and the painting and the time necessary for its slow execution. He proceeds through countless layers of paint, from lightest to darkest, placed on a multitude of small pieces of tape that mask and then free the canvas, translating the image without 'romantic' effects.