NICOLAS GRENIER - Flags

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Nicolas Grenier: Flags, the Canadian painter's third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will run from April 25 through June 6, 2026, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 25th, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. Following is a statement by the artist. In 2026, the word "flag" immediately conjures the nation-state, that structural entity from which nationalism and authoritarianism periodically resurge. As a Canadian artist exhibiting in the United States, I cannot ignore the shifting global political landscape: the end of an era, deepening divisions and conflicts, the retreat into mutually exclusive camps. Politically, it seems urgent to imagine new forms of organization that enable pluralistic and inclusive collective identities. What does a post-nationalist world order look like? While painting obviously cannot bring about revolution, it is an ideal language to bypass worldly constraints, connect us to intangible aspirations, and translate these into visible form, however subjectively. The starting point for this exhibition was the desire to take on the flag, this supreme icon of nationalism, and to reverse its logic. Traditional flags deploy simple graphic elements and a few pure colors to produce a clear, exclusive signifier of identity (such as the myth of national identity— one homeland, one people, one culture). I wanted to make works that, while evoking the idea of a flag, visually and emotionally contradict its principles. Instinctively, I pursued a vision of graphic forms dissolving into the rendering of matter itself. The result, with one exception, is a series of abstractions that rely on delicate and improbable chromatic relationships. The geometry unfolds in brushed fields of color with little contrast of light and shadow, so that the images seem to float, in motion, ready to disappear the moment our eyes stop focusing. In the paintings gathered here, the concept of the flag is simultaneously present and erased. I sought to create iconoclastic paintings—anti-flags—while also imagining new icons, identity symbols suggesting mixing, inclusion, and change. It is the superposition of the concept and its opposite that interests me. If we are willing to think of these paintings as "flags", perhaps we can glimpse a world structurally and politically different from our own, a world whose entities are best represented by atmospheric, poetic, emotive abstractions. A world we should feel intuitively, like the weather or a premonition. I make no claim to having succeeded in painting the vision I describe. But these works reflect my sincere attempt to represent the emergence of a new paradigm through the fog of the present. — Nicolas Grenier