News
Reality is Canceled
Online exhibition of moving image works
Hunter Shaw Fine Arts
April 3 - May 1, 2020
[Visit exhibition]
Nicolas Grenier at Bradley Ertaskiran
Featured exhibition on Contemporary Art Daily (March 2020)
[View here]
Nicolas Grenier: échapper au système
Article in L’inconvient by Anne-Marie Letarte (printemps 2020)
[View here]
The New Masters: The 2019 Sobey Art Award, Part 1
CBC Ideas, interview with Mary Link (March 2020)
[Listen here]
Positions: Le bunker occupé par Nicolas Grenier
Review of the exhibition in Le Devoir by Marie-Ève Charron (Feb 2020)
[Read here]
About the work
Context
Like
many, I strongly believe that the times we live in, dominated by a growth-based
and profit-oriented economic paradigm, call for an existential reassessment of
where humanity as a whole is going. This feels at once urgent, abstract and
impossible. The small concrete things we can do, such as recycling, buying local, etc., seem
irrelevant in the face of the structural nature of the problem. Language itself
seems too indebted to economics to adequately formulate the questions we must
address. If we want to reconsider the very idea of how things are organized on
the most primary level, then what metrics can we use that are not already the design
of the existing organization? What kind of language is appropriate to explore,
communicate and discuss these problems? In other words: what are the poetics of
structural change? This question is at the core of my research and work.
Work
My work focuses on the connections between the systems that shape the
concrete and logistical aspects of our lives— in the social, cultural,
political and economic spheres — and the evolution of the values and beliefs on which these
systems are built. I try to create artworks that make visible, through
different strategies, a variety of questions relating to the transformation of
the social order, both within the context of current societal issues and from a
fictional or speculative point of view. For example, how can one design a truly
inclusive system that incorporates even the very thing that will break it? I'm
interested in imagining models and systems where poetry and functionality meet
through existential questions.
Most of my projects are built around themes such as moneyless
economies, radical inclusivity, giving up individualism, and other ideas that
evoke a paradigm shift in values and beliefs. My goal is to question the
structures that shape the relation between individuals and the collective body:
between people living together and the built environment that defines their
interactions, between strangers exchanging resources and a shared notion of
"value" that makes transactions possible, between citizens sharing a
common vision and the embodiment of this vision in a community meeting, an
activist group, a political party, or a nation-state. I try to examine the
invisible forces at play in these questions, and to translate them into systems
where elements such as time, social dynamic, space or color give form to
otherwise intangible notions.
Many of my works, such
as paintings, installations and audio loops, ask the viewer to engage in contemplative
or meditative experiences. I'm interested in the possibility of slowing down
time, of providing a multidimensional space where complex ideas can gently
dissolve through a perceptual experience. Painting, in particular, allows me to
blend the analytical with the poetic, to combine structural rigor with
psychedelic environments, geometric abstraction and text elements, diagrams and
color fields. Other works and projects
are conceived as dynamic components made to interfere with the larger economic
structures we inhabit. These projects operate as interactive and
functional mechanisms, such as economic systems (The Time of the Work, 2016), think tank sessions (Built-In, 2019) or surveys (Mapping Exercise, 2019-2020).
This interventionist
approach is something that I want to push further with new collaborative
projects currently in development.
Audio / Video / Text
A few selections:
Sobey Art Awards 2019: Nicolas Grenier
Short video presentation of my work (2019)
[Watch here]
The Fatal Optimism of the Bar Graph: Nicolas Grenier
Text by Ezrha Jean Black, Artillery (2018)
[Read here]
Podcast Into This / Episode #5 : Nicolas Grenier
Interview with Marx Ruiz-Wilson (2017)
[Listen here]
Le temps de l’œuvre, le temps du travail / The Time of The Work
Catalogue of the project (2016)
[View PDF in English + Français]
