JÉRÉMIE LENOIR

Born in 1983, Jérémie Lenoir is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique de l’Université de Tours and the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design d’Orléans. Aiming for an anthropological approach rather than an objective representation of a landscape “truth”, Jérémie Lenoir’s photographs offer a singular, sensitive journey into what Marc Augé called “non-places”. Influenced as much by the artists of the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf as by abstract expressionist painters (or Rothko, Noland, Soulages, Malevitch, etc.), the French artist’s work attempts to represent reality and transfigure it into tableaux: between poetic imagination and social concern, he aspires to bring a new realism to our contemporary territories.

For nearly 15 years, Jérémie Lenoir’s work has been building an anthropology of contemporary landscapes while exploring the limits of the photographic medium. In his long-term projects and monumental installations, Lenoir acts as a plastician, inviting us on a journey into an abstract world that he forces us to decipher. Despite his compositions drawing on the codes and history of painting, his series are deeply rooted in reality, and tell of the silent mutations of our societies. He insists that nothing in his photographs is faked, retouched, erased or added. His shooting protocol reinforces this desire for neutrality in the treatment of landscapes: locations are chosen beforehand and then flown over over several years to capture their evolution, and his aerial shots are always taken at the same time, at the same altitude and with the same focal length.

And yet, his images avoid being statements or documentaries, shifting our gaze, transfiguring reality and questioning the meaning, history and intimacy of the world around us. The combination of the aerial point of view and his pictorial influences (Soulages, Rothko, Noland, Malevitch…) calls into question both the photographic medium’s ability to reproduce reality and the ability of our landscapes to inscribe themselves in a principle of identity. His “tableaux” thus offer a rereading of contemporary territories in which reality and imagination, presence and absence, withdrawal and attraction, retreat and abandonment are in dialogue.

For Jérémie Lenoir, it is from this ambivalence that the work acquires its autonomy, and from this autonomy that a new possibility of landscape is born.

__