Margins | Jérémie Lenoir

This, the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery, brings together the “Dust” and “Lander” series, produced between 2015 and 2017 and 2017 and 2021 respectively.

Combining research into the entropy of contemporary landscapes with experimentation with the photographic medium, “Dust” is a project that Jérémie Lenoir carried out in Salt Lake City, in the United States. Echoing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, this series explores the boundary between water and land around the salt lake, where human settlements extract sodium, magnesium, potassium and oil. Always using the same production protocol, always without retouching, the body of work is resolutely more abstract and explores colour for the first time. The forms are composed by machines or flows, while the colours and their saturation are the work of algae, micro-organisms or additives that accelerate evaporation. Claiming a genuine confusion with drawing or painting, “Dust” confronts us with the dissolution of the vernacular, of which our territories are the first witnesses.

“Lander”, a project carried out along the 1,200km length of the Rhine, from its source at Lake Constance to its estuary in Rotterdam, asserts its anchorage in reality, using the same protocol and focusing in particular on the extraction, transport, storage and use of coal and minerals. The series renews and refines the artist’s photographic style, drawing on a symbolism that almost verges on the spiritual. In a dialogue between reality and chimera, presence and absence, retreat and abandonment, the images assert a radical artistic bias close to black and white, and question our ability to look at, understand and appropriate our landscapes. So what do we see? Macro flints? The wrinkles of a hand? Drifting icebergs? In these works we project our own artistic references as well as our vision of a childlike, dreamlike, scientific or purely sensory world… we read in them multiple cosmogonies that Jérémie Lenoir invites us to decipher, convinced of the imperative need to create, through the imagination, an intimacy with the world around us.