Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Dumbfounded Prophets, an installation of new paintings by Nicolas Grenier, to be presented from March 31 through May 5, 2018. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 31st, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.Over the last eight years Nicolas Grenier's practice has evolved into an ecosystem that includes paintings, architectural installations, lecture-performances, sculpture and experimental economic models. In Dumbfounded Prophets, Grenier continues his ongoing investigations into the aesthetics of abstraction in relation to systems of power and its effects on the individual and society. Informed by his multidisciplinary approach, Grenier has integrated a meticulous crafting of color and pictorial space with a deft understanding of diagrammatic language sourced from architecture and design, management strategies, and theory.Grenier's paintings combine and reshape visual signs employed by corporate entities, belief systems, and regimes of power that dominate the neoliberal society. Each painting presents ideas, theories, or emotional states/sensations that rely on various strategies of organizing space -- pictorial, digital, graphic, schematic, cosmic, perspectival -- in order to communicate the complexities of mediated human experience. Some of the narratives unfolding in these highly ordered surfaces depict complex systems of thought and knowledge while others show seemingly minimal compositions with latent symbolic implications. All arrows point to the challenges of being a political individual in the world today. Grenier's work addresses the philosophical and moral dimensions inherent within political thought and action, including the navigation in and around the theory and/or practice of activism, violence, inequality, entrepreneurialism, and self-determination. Grenier identifies moments when the attempts to control meaning through form reveal ideological idiosyncrasies and he didactically pushes them to their logical conclusions. His paintings reveal the honesty, absurdity, beauty, and dangers of rationalization and dogmatism -- exemplified in the margins of the painting Perspectives (2018) by an unidentified narrator who implores: