His work has frequently tied ideas of urbanism, disaster, paranoia, and social decay together through the appropriating of high-end corporate design, itself heavily indebted to the work of non-objective painting. (Coincidentally, Grenier is also currently showing work in a group exhibition at Fondation Guido Molinari.) This was approached in a range of cascading warm and cool colours and juxtaposed with various texts and occasional interpolated imagery to suggest the sorts of scenarios that typically get termed dystopian or utopian.
I have always found them more ambiguous than these terms suggest and something far closer to the ambivalence one can see at play in the work of novelist J.G. Ballard. The English author was always explicit about his debt to the surrealists and it is surrealism that seems to cast its biggest shadow over Grenier’s latest work and subverts his more typical tendencies toward the cybernetic, both as a theme and part of his general practice or “research.”
One of the peculiarities of his work has been that despite coding it in a lot of language about the possibilities of communal living etc., the works themselves have been consistently cool and alien, and often read as more satirical than their potentially utopian framing tends to suggest yet nowhere near moral enough for the opposite reading.
In previous work, Grenier had relied on text integrated into his imagery to provide some minimal mooring to sociological categories -- however distorted, nightmarish or absurd they may have seemed -- to index them but this is gone. What remains is the same “non-objective” design aspects, but even these seem to have become frazzled and warped, no longer cleanly delineated and dramatizing their illegibility in the distortion of their forms. Although this nuance seemed lost in a typically clueless review from Le Devoir. When there is a sign, it is in the form of various botanical motifs, which appear to have a similar function to the icons discussed below.
Occupying the primary display space, the works at Bradley Ertaskiran include two sculptures that melt together various deities into Kali-like figures, several of his typically vibrantly coloured paintings, and highly detailed charcoal drawings that are among some of his most traditionally figurative work. The largest of these is a reconfigured map of the world and the others combine his typical interest in architectural forms with numerous figures taken from religious and political mythology.
The large map image, also reminiscent of the textural experiments of the surrealists, is there not to be read. The land masses and borders collapse, fragment as they are blenderized and reconstituted in new forms, only their delineation by water remaining when they are not effaced by cloud.
Idols (Christian, Hindu, Marxist, liberal, aboriginal, from the Venus of Willendorf to the heads of Rapa Nui, etc.) all stand as icons for various cults and “cultures” are only the plastic cliches of a game with no defined rules or legible board. (This is, notably, what makes it very different from something like Öyvind Fahlström's World Politics Monopoly). Denied any divine status, the various idols and totems are clearly rendered as kitsch figurines, set in a space that simultaneously suggests graph paper and a VR space. It is the world with design (rather than creation or construction) as its reality principle.
The exhibition text suggests:
Spanning across 18 feet and devoid of borders, the reimagined process of territorial mapping indirectly addresses the bias embedded in extractive networks of nationalism and coloniality. Drawn from an angled and aerial perspective—while still embodying a top-down power structure—some areas were resized in relative proximity to more specific regions depicted from true satellite distance. As he includes identifiable landmarks and passing clouds, Grenier plays at the ever-changing nature of looking at, and being in, the world.
Left out of this interpretative framing, but clear in the work, is that it is a world populated solely by symbols and works of art. The entire socio-political history hallucinated into it by the sentences just quoted does not even amount to a void. In doing so, the works invite you to look at the world effaced of socio-cultural significance as simply the domain of art.
The accompanying text had a particularly hard time trying to square up the work with some kind of socio-political meaning even if, only a few sentences later it ends up nullifying any non-ridiculous grounds for doing so before ending in a paragraph of utter vagueness. Grenier himself is guilty of doing this as well, although it never convincingly translates to the work itself. Even at its most overtly polemical, there are consistent processes of inversion at play that unsettle any concrete claim.
Grenier would claim that:
If we want to reconsider the very idea of how things are organized on the most primary level, then what building blocks, what units, what metrics can we use that are not already the design of the existing organization? What are the poetics of change when it comes to structures, systems and economics? These are the questions I think about, and I try to make works that translate them in a visual form.
This seems to be precisely what the “poetics” he has relied on has come explicitly to present as ludicrous.