In Alexandre Lenoir's canvases, images seem to come from afar. A lake, a line of water, a group of trees, almost invisible figures bathed in light. Nothing appears truly stable. Every element seems on the verge of surfacing or dissolving within the painting's surface. With Par la force des choses, the Musée de l'Orangerie dedicates to Alexandre Lenoir the sixteenth event in its Contrepoint contemporain series, a program that invites contemporary artists to engage with the museum's historic collections. In this case, the dialogue unfolds around perception, light, and the movement of water, inevitably reminiscent of Claude Monet's Water Lilies. Born in 1992, Lenoir constructs his works from personal photographs, slowly transformed through a process of layering and subtraction. The paint accumulates in successive layers over fragments of tape that cover and free parts of the canvas, allowing the image to emerge in a discontinuous and fragmentary manner. The pictorial material serves not to fix the landscape but to render it unstable. The reflections on the water, the light on the trees, and the surfaces swept by the wind seem to continually change before the viewer's gaze. The human figures in the paintings remain distant, almost indifferent, dispersed within natural environments that fill the entire scene. The connection with Monet runs through the exhibition without becoming an explicit reference. What interests Lenoir above all is the ability of painting to transform itself through light and the movement of the gaze. As in the Nymphéas rooms, here too the surface seems to continually shift, retaining and dispersing light throughout the space.
