BORDERS by Jérémie Lenoir

As the product of political and economic processes, the contemporary landscape has evolved today to disappear into its own constraints. The non-places are nowadays multiplying themselves into globalized patterns, while saturated urban peripheries are compartmentalized in impersonal and dehumanized architecture. Realized between 2010 and 2014, BORDERS studies the urban / rural frontier in France. These places of tensions reveal our landscape evolution and cast doubt on the meaning of the society we are currently building.

Then, the transfiguration of the landscape embodied in abstract painting leads to question the photographic medium in its capacity to recreate reality. Despite a very specific protocol (each photograph’s shot at the same time, at the same altitude, with the same focal lens and nothing is added or removed), I choose to invite the viewers in an abstract world that requires time to decipher. In the second phase, the combination of aerial perspective and abstraction permits an investigation on the ability of our contemporary territories to deliver any form of intelligibility or any proof of vernacular identity. Thus, between the necessity of capturing the real and its transfiguration into paintings, my pictures are attempting to give a new realism to our contemporary territories.