NEW YORK, NY.- Almine Rech New York, Tribeca is presenting Between dogs and wolves, Alexandre Lenoir's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 6 to October 19, 2024.
In Alexandre Lenoirs solo exhibition at Almine Rech 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 Lenoirs distinctive artistic process and its rigorous, conceptual, physical, and metaphysical underpinnings. First and foremost, the phrase refers to Lenoirs 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 Lenoirs 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.
Lenoirs 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 Lenoirs conceptual, or indeed metaphysical, studio practice. Lenoirs practice can be called metaphysical in the simple sense of meta-physicsmeta: 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 Lenoirs pictorial world.
A full essay by Joachim Pissarro will be available on site and featured in the upcoming Skira monograph. The essay is available upon request.