It is as if this art wanted the gaze to shine, the object to stand, the real to exist, in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire, or at least to evoke this sublime condition”
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real

While Nicolas Grenier’s portraits, are at first glance, seductive paintings of images you might find in a Larry Clark inspired fashion feature, there is much more at stake in the cinematic blossomings of these figurative works.

Grenier is fundamentally interested in the construction of popular images, how notions of style and beauty are worked into being and then sold, consumed and accepted as authentic.  Using strategies of Superrealism, Grenier’s portraits exploit a photographic vocabulary of illusion while simultaneously denying the reproductive possibilities of the photographic image (*1).  Grenier is not simply interested in deconstructing the commodified visual representation of the body as young and seductive.  Rather, his portraits renegotiate the authenticity of his own media influenced youth culture.

Each of Grenier’s portraits is filtered through the same technology used in the advertisements he finds his peers mirrored in. Beginning with the photograph, Grenier takes on the role of director, setting a stage for his models, which are also his friends, for impromptu, nightlong photo-shoots.  Grenier takes hundreds of photos, looking for images that might conjure an aura lost in the overwhelming simulacrum of the contemporary visual landscape. Grenier transforms his photographs into digital images, manipulating the cropping, the colours, light and contrasts on Photoshop to generate the ink-jet printed image he reproduces on the canvas. The result is cinematic, super saturated colours, figures staged in an uncanny light.  They are real and illusory, often with the appearance of a film still. The images suggest a character framed in a scene, yet Grenier’s photographs, the origin of the paintings, are most often long exposures, only a minute in his friend’s lives.  This cinematic effect was most evident in his series of large-scale portraits, L'étrangeté du réel, exhibited at theFestival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in 2005.  Here, his large-scale portraits, dimly lit against a black backdrop, hung like film projections mediating the empty space of the auditorium with the disconcerting gaze of the stylishly disenchanted. 

In Portraits, Grenier continues to explore the relationship between the contemporary visual environment and the figurative representation of youth in art.  Like other contemporary artists, the representation of youth is an idea suffused with the ideologies of society at large.  At 24, Grenier is himself aware of the possibilities of being both a mirror for society and mirrored back in its overwhelming visual culture.  His cinematic portraits simultaneously negotiate a charged space between photography and painting, popular culture and the avant-garde, in an effort to re-appropriate the simulated image in his own reconstruction of the real.  Both subject and object, the gaze of his figures confrontationally challenge the viewer to respond to their presence, making it impossible to simply walk passed as if it were just another glossy spread.