Diving into painting, inside the painting itself, seems to call Nicolas Grenier with the exhibition sketches of an inventory. Presented in the very large hall of the Bradley Ertaskiran gallery, this set of fifteen works, including two sculptures, navigates audaciously between real space and imaginary space. We are in a gallery and float at the same time in a stratosphere in the company of layers of colors and landscapes proposed by the artist.
Immersive exhibition? Yes, but without the support of a device, electronic or otherwise. It is in the subtlety of the occupation of the room that arises this feeling of plunging into an impalpable place. Only transformation of the usual decoration: the six columns were painted in dark blue.
Renowned colourist, Nicolas Grenier made a name for himself with an apparently abstract painting, exploiting the space of the painting, the pictorial space, by succession of chromatic planes. Economic referents (figures, words, diagrams) gave the works a context that went beyond simple abstraction. The back and forth between the painted surface and the political statement colors his exhibitions.
With sketches of an inventory, the commentary is about our geographical understanding of the world. The central work, the most imposing — Inventory (terrains, coasts, reliefs, climates, distances) and its five meters long —, reproduces a topographic map whose relations of scale, border and readability are disconcerting. This work and five other smaller ones clash with the practice of Nicolas Grenier: they are in black and white.
These charcoals lean more towards non-abstract art. We see natural or built spaces, apparently isolated or abandoned. Hazy or puffy shapes (like clouds or oversized tree roots) create an aura of worry. Above all, these vertical representations describe a hierarchical world, organized by strata, in the artist’s own style.
Alternating with the charcoals, Nicolas Grenier presents his usual colored exercises in oil and acrylic. There is also a question of spaces, as in Portal, where a succession of planes going from orange to black creates a perspective view. The sculptures, figurative, mix political or religious characters. It is in other immense pools of knowledge, impossible to bring together other than in this world in suspension, floating and vulnerable, that Nicolas Grenier wanted us to enter.