Alexandre Lenoir’s Paintings Are More Elaborate Than You Can Imagine

French painter Alexandre Lenoir works in Vitry-sur-Seine, southeast of the Parisian city center, in an enormous former garage near an Indian beauty parlor and a fast food joint called Chicken Time. In this cavernous space, his work disrupts the typical painted image in that each canvas is executed using graphs, charts and mechanical motions repeated continuously over long stretches. It’s a complex process requiring masking tape, a projector and layers upon layers of paint, that together create an astonishingly textural surface.

“Between Dogs and Wolves,” which opens tomorrow (September 6) at Almine Rech’s Tribeca location in New York, presents Lenoir’s latest output. His distinctive process is hidden from the viewer, but every canvas involves rigorous artistic protocol based upon instructions regarding colors and mixing and dabbing off, all carried out by studio assistants. Lenoir has created an artistic language of his own making—a “grammar in the studio,” as he puts it—which requires as many as forty layers of paint to be applied (in the dark upon a photo projection). These scrupulous gestures contrast with the swathes of canvas left raw.

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In his new work, assembled strips of previous canvases gathered from his studio—“in memory of other canvases”—are reused to depict his grandfather’s house. An Italian restaurant interior—Emilio’s, its walls covered with portraits—is intensified with gold leaf. There’s a trompe l’oeil canvas where the frame is actually part of the image, a wink to the Italian Renaissance style.

Earlier this summer, Lenoir welcomed us into his studio to discuss shrugging off art school skeptics, his family’s influence on his work and the ambivalence he feels when it comes to structure versus instinct.

First, tell me about this studio space.

I installed myself and my team here two years ago. Paris is my home, my base. I’m also part-time in New York; I recently opened a small studio in DUMBO to expand my relationship with the art world there—New York is a big challenge. I do my largest canvases here in Paris, but the approach is the same between the two studios. I provide instructions for paintings based on photographic images.

Can you start from the beginning—how did you get to where you are today?

I discovered painting when I was 18 years old; I was very happy to enjoy the material with my brush and do self-portraits. I went to the Beaux-Arts de Paris and graduated in 2016. In my first year at school, I thought I wanted to paint nature without using brushstrokes because nature is not made by the hand of man. It needed to be done in a way other than painting with a brush because I wanted to depict things in their essence—I was looking for a certain kind of reality.

I developed this technique with tape and a projector—close to silkscreen, in a way. I don’t want too much brushstroke: I don’t want too much intention. It’s about faith; you must trust what you’re doing because you don’t see the endpoint. There’s a lot of paint underneath the tape. It erodes, like nature, and I need my painting to be the same.

Did you get pushback at school regarding this non-classical technique?

Not from the teachers. However, the practice was different from other art students who painted with their brushes, staring at the painting all day long and needing daylight. I need darkness, and I don’t see what I’m doing. We imagine an artist as the most romantic person. I wanted something different, to be very methodical. Other students mocked me. I did my five-year coursework in a year and a half because I didn’t want to be in school too much. I worked at home. I wanted to do large-format, and the paintings took up all the space. I’d spend four to six months on a painting because the process is very long. I’d put all the tape on by myself and the layers of paint. Sometimes my friends helped out. The painting was on the floor, and I walked on it to paint, not being cautious of drips. I experimented in my apartment, living next to a painting. When I graduated, I received help from a few collectors. I sold my painting a bit more expensively than an artist should. I was like, I need help because a painting takes six months.

So it was a sort of patronage. Did you meet collectors during the school’s open studio visits?

Yes, and they were happy to buy my painting for higher prices to help me develop my practice.

That’s amazing. And then?

Right after school, I went to Morocco for a year and a half. I needed money to go there and hire people and pay them well. I wanted to do a residency there because I’d been there for three months prior and I really liked the energy of Casablanca; it’s a very dynamic city. I found people in the street, and they came to work for me.

You did street casting for your studio help?

I had a team of people who didn’t know what they were doing, but I really liked that. It’s like Joseph Beuys’ idea of the artist as more of a choreographer or architect, making the painting where the painting is not expected. It’s in the lineage of Rudolph Stingel, too. He had this instruction painting, selling the instructions so you could make his painting. In 1970, he was looking at how an artist can be an artist by deconstructing what people think an artist is.

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The experience in Morocco was very rewarding. I did forty paintings there, though I only kept six. I didn’t feel comfortable selling them because I experimented a lot, to the extent that I didn’t give any instruction to the team. I just wanted them to do whatever they wanted. The paintings were theirs and mine; the boundary was blurry. I’m glad that I did that, but in the end, I didn’t recognize it as my work. After that experience, I knew more about what kind of an artist I wanted to be. The eyes of the artist and the wishes of an artist are very important, even if that artist doesn’t directly paint on the canvas. That’s what I learned.

After that, I went to Paris and wanted to find a gallery because I didn’t want to sell my paintings by myself. I got in touch with Almine Rech. I wanted a gallery that could really support me because it’s a long process. It costs me money since I need people to work with me on the canvas. I need this objectivity in my painting.

How many people are you working with at any given time?

I have a team of three people in Paris, and I have two people I work with in New York, part-time.

What are the criteria for studio helpers? Do they have to have an artistic background? 

Both. I have someone from Afghanistan who has the same non-relationship to art as those who worked for me in Casablanca and also someone who graduated from art school in Angers. In New York, one is an artist, and the other is a graphic designer. I selected them because they’re nice and supportive. The role requires energy because it’s taping all day long, putting layers of paint on the canvas, and using skills like stretching the canvas and maintaining the studio.

Have there been variations to your approach over time, or do you have your signature method?

I practically only paint with tape, but I think it could evolve, and I could have other ways of painting the canvas.

What does the exhibition title mean?

My show in New York is an opposition between day and night. “Between Dogs and Wolves” is a moment of the day when people don’t know if a creature is a dog or a wolf… in French, the expression is ‘entre chien et loup.’ It’s a moment of the day that is very important for light: dusk and twilight. The evolution of the light is the subject of my paintings. But it’s also the thing about dogs and wolves, the contrast between domestic and sauvage. Do I want to be a dog, or do I want to be a wolf in my practice? Do I want to be very methodical, or do I want to explode the canvas? I want both. I love thinking through a painting and also being very instinctive.

When you have discussions with collectors, are they surprised by your methods?

The gallery talks more about my relation to Guadeloupe and the Caribbean; the process is not something that I am dying to show, but I’m transparent because it’s a reality of my work. I build a system, which creates the feeling of a painting and the painting itself.

The gallery will publish a book about my work; there’s a text about my practice in relation to the Nabis and Bonnard and Impressionism within this pixelization… but also Fluxus and Yoko Ono and artists from the ‘70s, who wrote down their process, like, do this and do that and do that. This was art. Wade Guyton, too, works with the mechanical. My work is a combination of these. I think it’s even more interesting when you know my practice because it’s a way of thinking about painting, a statement about painting.

In Old Europe, artists had studios—Géricault, Rubens. It’s all about the gesture and the intelligence of the hand. It’s always a fight, in a way, to make my work understood because people just want to see beautiful paintings. My paintings are beautiful—they have this impact, this aesthetic shock. But I think about how I can paint something beautiful in a non-beautiful, non-conventional way that people wouldn’t have guessed. I’m not just painting a beautiful landscape by painting a beautiful landscape. That’s not interesting.

There’s a bit of insolence or provocation behind the work, would you say?

I do think I have that. Because it’s more about wanting people to be conscious about what they see. I’ve been working like this for ten years or so. When people know more about the work, it amplifies what they thought they knew about what’s underneath.

To return to your relationship with Guadeloupe, tell me about those origins. 

My mother is from there; my father is from Paris. I’m mixed. I went to Guadeloupe every summer since I was a child. Nature was very powerful and very present there, and I’m very inspired by the landscape and by the strength of nature. I love Paris, but it’s very controlled—it’s a city made for humans. I like facing a scope where humans are not the strongest presence. I like primal things, but I also have a lot of rules. It’s conflicted.

My Caribbean grandmother taught me that there is a relationship to things you don’t understand. In Guadeloupe, there are a lot of stories about how people transform during dark nights. It’s a fairy tale, but it’s something that I believe. In my painting, I’m seeking a relationship to mysteries. My practice is also very mysterious, because I achieve it by doing my math, an ordered system, following the instructions to the end–-but it still surprises me. I’m in love with the fact of being surprised.

Is your starting point always a photograph? 

Yes, but I can use a photo from sixty years ago taken by my father or one that I took. I have all these photos in one big folder named “potential.” Everything is there if I want to start a painting, and my painting is always human scale. In each, I try to have one thing that is completely different. When you find something during the painting process, it’s a happy accident, but when you do it again, it becomes a technique. And when you don’t want this to be a technique, you need to seek something else. I like the idea of painting as a doorway—something you’re invited to be part of, belonging to a space and a threshold.