French painter Alexandre Lenoir works in Vitry-sur-Seine, southeast of the Parisian city center, in an enormous former garage near an Indian beauty parlor and a fast food joint called Chicken Time. In this cavernous space, his work disrupts the typical painted image in that each canvas is executed using graphs, charts and mechanical motions repeated continuously over long stretches. It’s a complex process requiring masking tape, a projector and layers upon layers of paint, that together create an astonishingly textural surface.

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“Between Dogs and Wolves,” which opens tomorrow (September 6) at Almine Rech’s Tribeca location in New York, presents Lenoir’s latest output. His distinctive process is hidden from the viewer, but every canvas involves rigorous artistic protocol based upon instructions regarding colors and mixing and dabbing off, all carried out by studio assistants. Lenoir has created an artistic language of his own making—a “grammar in the studio,” as he puts it—which requires as many as forty layers of paint to be applied (in the dark upon a photo projection). These scrupulous gestures contrast with the swathes of canvas left raw.

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In his new work, assembled strips of previous canvases gathered from his studio—“in memory of other canvases”—are reused to depict his grandfather’s house. An Italian restaurant interior—Emilio’s, its walls covered with portraits—is intensified with gold leaf. There’s a trompe l’oeil canvas where the frame is actually part of the image, a wink to the Italian Renaissance style.

Earlier this summer, Lenoir welcomed us into his studio to discuss shrugging off art school skeptics, his family’s influence on his work and the ambivalence he feels when it comes to structure versus instinct.

First, tell me about this studio space.

I installed myself and my team here two years ago. Paris is my home, my base. I’m also part-time in New York; I recently opened a small studio in DUMBO to expand my relationship with the art world there—New York is a big challenge. I do my largest canvases here in Paris, but the approach is the same between the two studios. I provide instructions for paintings based on photographic images.

Can you start from the beginning—how did you get to where you are today?

I discovered painting when I was 18 years old; I was very happy to enjoy the material with my brush and do self-portraits. I went to the Beaux-Arts de Paris and graduated in 2016. In my first year at school, I thought I wanted to paint nature without using brushstrokes because nature is not made by the hand of man. It needed to be done in a way........

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