The distant smell of a black locust, the silent dance of a ghost in the visiting room
at The Address, April 15 – May 15, 2023

"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..."

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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.

Kalb al Akrab
at Galerie Lily Robert, Paris, October 21 – November 20, 2021

"Here is where induction and deduction collide - where trails become spots, and particles, the cosmos. The blue line, seen from another angle of the universe, appears red; everything branches and explodes, leaving its traces behind. Not trajectories- what we are witnessing is an obstacle course, an aimless drift, proceeding without deliberation towards a place nor precision towards an object but wandering here and there, as everything is intertwined; being here is like being there and vice versa.
In this kind of hic et nunc in which we operate - that is, our existence in space and time - our being does not indicate a mere spatial location but, as German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it: something more ambiguous and complex..."

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Here si Antares between the chords, Kalb Al Akrab, sixteenth brightest star and heart of the constellation, radiating its dazzling light on a tendinous, contracted leg just as it kisses the seventeenth major Arcana. Star and body on opposite walls —just as Gaia placed Orion and Scorpio at the antipodes make them respectively winter and summer, however inextricably linked by cosmic becoming; star and body drip the same blood while fragments like scattered meteorites are seized by a spidery hand.
It snatches and relaxes its grip as the universe pulsates and continues in flux, everything flowing and rotating, colors marking patterns of inter-astral space. The functional is in full harmony with abstraction; logic takes flight; geometries incite chaos instead of asserting order. An explosion of infinite deflagrations.

Ashell was found on Mars, the planet that references Kalb Al Akrab — the so-called constellation of Scorpio containing a vast number of stars, systems, stellar clouds and clusters — that which it is not, yet, at the same time, that which it comes from and to which it remains attracted.

Everything is now a vortex.

Blue pruno blue
at The Address, September 12 – November 03, 2020

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.