Artist: Édouard Nardon
Exhibition title: The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room
Venue: The Address, Brescia, Italy
Date: April 15 – May 15, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and The Address, Brescia
The Address is delighted to present:
“The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room” by New York-based French visual artist Édouard Nardon.
This exhibition features fiftheen new paintings created over the past three years and represents his second solo-exhibition at the gallery.
Although they may be seen purely as exercises in abstraction, Nardon’s paintings start from precise, figurative compositions based on personal fixations. Numerous small sketches on paper preface his work on unprimed canvases stapled onto the west facing walls of his Brooklyn studio. The paintings begin to render as Nardon outlines and composes the repeated motions of a chosen sketch, utilizing materials like marble dust, gesso, and raw pigments. He then proceeds to reduce and augment the work through a degree of unconscious separation, liberating himself from the initial and literal meanings from where he originally started. At a certain point the accumulations begin to assume form, within their own symbolic dimensions, as the artist begins to elaborate. Each seemingly disparate layer maintains a distance from the next, relating at times in conflict and others in harmony. The pictorial gestures made in and between each layer are comprised of contrasting brush strokes; starting broad and wide, then covered with meticulous mark making.
In addition to detail at the level of composition, Nardon’s works also conceptually consider the elements with which they are constructed. His color palette epitomizes the fundamental stages of the ancient alchemical quest of Magnum Opus, consisting of Nigredo (black), Albedi (white), Citrinitas (yellow), Rubedo (red), and Cauda Pavonis (Peacock’s Tail Blue).
The references implied within this palette construct and combine with the artist’s memories from his upbringing, building subjectivity and motif in a manner related to the meaning-making techniques of the Neo-Impressionists. Specific memory is referenced obliquely, nodding towards his early adventures in the boroughs of his youth and the scent of locust trees—from notions of solitude and confinement to the distant call of the Atlantic horizon.
These memories manifest in the paintings like ghosts, shadows and faceless figures materialized through conscious and unconscious gestures, controlled lines, and moments in which the irrational takes over and shows the artist a path not previously considered. There is a thematic return to the idea of origin from a synthesis, of a constant encounter, an intense workout: the well worn battle between agency and discovery, the conscious and subconscious, the ordinary and the strange.
Each work, despite being structured in multiple layers, contains a sole subject creating a consistency across the collection that foreshadows Nardon’s enigmatic formula. The philosopher’s stone as a frantic search made of continuous efforts, some well-executed, others unsuccessful and therefore destroyed. Nardon’s foundations, resolute in their clarity, persistently allow for an invisible presence, whether ghostly, painterly or memorial, in order to establish a connection and take us into the painter’s own idiosyncratic diegetic synthesis.
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room, 2023, exhibition view, The Address, Brescia
Édouard Nardon, The left hand stream — I burn and I rouse, I carry out the fire’s bidding. The right hand stream — I bewitch and I multiply, 2021, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 202 x 160 cm
Édouard Nardon, First meteor, then comet and furnace, 2021, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 195 x 153 cm
Édouard Nardon, He can’t move but he sees everything, 2021, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 195 x 168 cm
Édouard Nardon, His face is a column of cobalt flames and fountains of chlorine are flowing from the tips of his crystal wings, 2023, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 195 x 168 cm
Édouard Nardon, Waltz of a tracksuited ghost in the visiting room, 2020, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 200 x 145 cm
Édouard Nardon, Citrinitas, dawn on the intersection of his eyelashes and her lower lip, 2020, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 205 x 165 cm
Édouard Nardon, Citrinitas, dawn on the intersection of his radius and her plexus, 2020, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 205 x 170 cm
Édouard Nardon, Citrinitas, dawn on the intersection of his clavicle and her cheekbone, 2020, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 195 x 165 cm
Édouard Nardon, First meteor, then comet and furnace, 2021, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 190x 140 cm
Édouard Nardon, My chest is a ghost dancing in a blazing garden, 2023, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 200 x 170 cm
Édouard Nardon, Self-portrait as a shadow, as a vanished garden, as a false acacia, 2023, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 200 x 170 cm
Édouard Nardon, I extracted the seven thorns, and will use my pierced palm as a protective screen to watch the sunrise in a few hours, 2023, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, linen oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm
Édouard Nardon, In this sense, his fall is an acent, 2021, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 195 x 150 cm
Édouard Nardon, I did one thousand pull-ups and my hands became two peacocks, 2020, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 202 x 153 cm
Édouard Nardon, Her temples behind her veil are like the two halves of a split pomegranate, 2021, Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen canvas, 185 x 140 cm