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 the ‘truth’ of the landscape, Jérémie Lenoir’s photographs offer a singular and sensitive journey into what Marc Augé called the ‘non-places’. The work of this French artist attempts to represent reality and transform it into tableaux: somewhere between poetic imagination and social concern, he aspires to bring a new realism to our contemporary territories.

Jérémie Lenoir’s work constructs 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 visual artist, 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.

So he insists that nothing in his photographs is faked, retouched, erased or added. The way he shoots reinforces this desire for neutrality in his treatment of landscapes: the locations are chosen beforehand and then flown over for 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.Yet his images avoid being statements or documentaries, shifting our gaze, transforming reality, and questioning the meaning, history and intimacy of the world around us. The combination of the aerial viewpoint and his pictorial influences (Soulages, Rothko, Noland, Malevitch, etc.) calls into question both the ability of the photographic medium to reproduce reality and the ability of our landscapes to form part of a principle of identity.