Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present NICOLAS GRENIER: One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune, on view from November 8 through December 20, 2014. An artist’s reception will be held on Saturday, November 8, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Grenier, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Montreal, is currently participating in the 2014 Biennale de Montreal, L'avenir (Looking Forward), at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune relays the cruel optimism of political ideals and proposals. The paintings in in this show propose a dialectical tension between the perceptual and the didactic as visual and verbal signs are deployed into complex forms of abstraction and representation. Based on the interaction between concept, language, color and form, these systems evoke conflicting ideologies, changes in the social order and issues of inclusion and exclusion. Arrows and other representational minutiae of bureaucracy function as signifiers for the strategic planning models of corporate and government enterprise, while the use of text creates an indexical relation to specific ideas and concepts outside the painting—yet the meaning of these words remains relative to the colors and shapes they are attached to.

For Grenier, color functions as a kind of ecosystem to house the social, political, and cultural systems that serve as points of departure within the work. Gradation is used as a scalable, mutable device for organizing the paintings into large, concentric forms, as well as the interface through which we experience smaller letterforms and vectors. Thus, color plays a double agent: working to both solidify meaning (produce readability) and obscure signs as they become recognizable. Grenier's intuitive but highly ordered system of depiction amounts to a schema that reveals abstraction as both a system of control through this confounding means, and also a possible respite from the administrative, logistical, and quantitative—reigniting the color field in service to the politics of subjectivity.

Nicolas Grenier received his BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2004 and his MFA from CalArts, Los Angeles, in 2010. He lives and works in Los Angeles and Montreal, and has exhibited regularly in Canada, the United States and in Europe. Recent exhibitions include Schemas/Assorted Templates at galerie Art Mûr in Montreal; Promised Land Template (Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; The Road; Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles; The Work of The Work, University of California, Santa Barbara; Building on Ruins; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; Color Consciousness; Torrance Art Museum; Untitled Tower/Brutalist Treehouse; Concord, Los Angeles; Corner-Thru; Choi & Lager Gallery, Cologne and Union Gallery, London; and, Proximities; galerie Art Mûr, Montreal. His work is included in the Loto-Québec collection, the Musée Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec (CPOA collection), as well as numerous corporate and private collections.