Promised Land Template is a box within a box; a room within a room; a self-contained exhibition space within Commonwealth & Council that hosts a built environment for paintings.

Housed inside this wooden structure of flesh-colored gradient walls and tiles of desert sand, the three paintings (Promised Land Template, Incoming Flux, and Rip Current) propose a diagrammatic rupture of systematized order. The revisionist text on these chromatic fields i.e., APPROVING SILENCE OF CELESTIAL INFINITY, INDIFFERENT DIRT, and PRISMATIC ORDER, dispel tenacious rhetoric of border control and nation-state.

Reconsidering the language of architecture, urban planning, symbolism, and color codes, Nicolas Grenier’s work shifts the parameters of existing systems we inhabit—political, economic, cultural, and social—and the principles (or absence of principles) at the root of these systems.

Nicolas Grenier received his BFA from Concordia University in 2004 and his MFA from CalArts in 2010. Recent exhibitions include: The Work of The Work at University of California, Santa Barbara; Building on Ruins at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; Untitled Tower/Brutalist Treehouse at Concord, Los Angeles; Corner-Thru at Choi&Lager Gallery, Cologne and Union gallery, London; and Proximities at galerie Art Mûr, Montreal. He lives and works in Los Angeles and Montreal, and is represented by galerie Art Mûr.