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.

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.

Winter in a Wife Beater revels in the duality of artwork and out-of-context origins. Attempting to first ostracize, then situate back into, the world at large. Rather than position the viewer as a prisoner, the work facilitates observations that suggest the artifice of a prison, as well as the possible connections to be made within and beyond its walls. Many of Nardon’s objects occupy a mental space and relate to the notion of routine —especially that of someone held captive. Can routine dissolve substance? Nardon’s use of soap deftly reconciles the relationship between material, memory and temporal dimensions. For once a bar of soap has almost completely dissolved, it ceases to be an object and comes to embody an unaccounted-for passing of time.
The exhibit asks : to what degree is one’s imagination the product of their restraints? Nardon states that these works are, ‘not testimonials or free-forms, but pretexts to functionality that become proto-art objects.’ Appropriately, Édouard Nardon opens this exhibition with a sprawling sculpture, a large looming parachute engulfed in a cast of the artist’s foot. It is as though the bound foot of the Hanged Man has liberated itself, only to take the form of a sculpture, demonstrating the precarious position of escaping one space, but being stuck in another.

Najib Bakchatti

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.