Alexandre Lenoir. Par la force des choses

Alexandre Lenoir, born in 1992, primarily paints landscapes traversed by often ghostly figures, indifferent to the viewer. His paintings are executed from photographs he chooses as memories of happy moments, although dominated by an imperious nature to which he leaves a degree of arbitrariness. Rather than faithfully representing nature, he seeks an alchemy that gives birth to works seeming 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 himself or non-painter assistants, on images transformed by time, both the time elapsed between the shot and the painting, and the time required for its slow realisation.

He proceeds by innumerable layers of paint, from lightest to darkest, applied to a multitude of small pieces of tape that mask then free the canvas, translating without "romantic" effects the projected image from which he paints.

Alexandre Lenoir: "It started with a canvas titled Les Cévennes, where to represent the surface of the water and its reflections, I had to find a way to apply as few brushstrokes as possible.

That's when the tapes came into play, which were a way of preparing the ground for my paint washes that I applied laterally to the canvas like a printer.

In the end, when I removed the tapes, I saw an image as if I had dreamed it, whose architecture and frames were originally present but within which the painting took its full place.

Subsequently, I developed a very intimate relationship with this translative method that leads me to mask, cover, then uncover. In short, it's a form of revelation that can evoke revelation in photography.

] it's admirable to see, but it's enough to drive one mad to want to do that. " (Letter cited in Gustave Geffroy, Monet, sa vie, son œuvre [1924], Paris, Macula, 1980, p. 30). Alexandre Lenoir experiments with the tension between a realism