Delhi Photo Festival 2015: Jérémie Lenoir's "Borders" series

Jérémie Lenoir graduated from the Polytechnique School of the University of Tours and from the Superior Art and Design School of Orléans. Since 2008, he studied the landscape mutations from the aerial point of view.

Deeply inspired by Dusseldorf Kunstakademie artists and expressionist painters such as Rothko, Noland, Soulages and Malevich, Jérémie Lenoir makes use of abstraction, flatness and neutrality to meticulously build what Barthes referred to as “pensive photographs”.

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 into impersonal and dehumanized architecture.

'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 questioning of 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 invite viewers into 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 attempt to give a new realism to our contemporary territories.

Jérémie Lenoir graduated from the Polytechnique School of the University of Tours and from the Superior Art and Design School of Orléans. Since 2008, he studied the landscape mutations from the aerial point of view.

Deeply inspired by Dusseldorf Kunstakademie artists and expressionist painters such as Rothko, Noland, Soulages and Malevich, Jérémie Lenoir makes use of abstraction, flatness and neutrality to meticulously build what Barthes referred to as “pensive photographs”.