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Most vivid is the smell, the volatile emanation of the moist tropical air, ascend- ing amidst webs of exuberant vegetation. Confronting Alexandre Lenoir’s paintings is al- most a ‘molecular affair’.[1] However, the activation of the olfactory through the visual, a quasi-synesthetic experience does not always occur in every ‘good’ picture depicting a tropical landscape. What’s at play here is not merely the imagery but also the materiality, embodied in the rugged terrain of the pictorial surface, through an impressively labori- ous and lengthy process in the artist’s studio.
Each of Lenoir’s …