Édouard Nardon (b. 1978, Bordeaux) lives and works in New York City, USA.
Although they may seem like mere exercises in abstraction, Nardon’s paintings originate from precise figurative compositions rooted in personal fixations. Numerous small sketches on paper precede the work on canvas.
The paintings begin to reveal themselves when the artist outlines and composes repeated gestures on the chosen draft, using materials such as marble dust, gypsum and pigments. He then either reduces or enriches the work through a degree of unconscious separation, freeing himself from the original and literal meaning. As the accumulations start to take shape within their symbolic dimensions, the artist begins processing. Each layer, though seemingly heterogeneous, is kept at a distance from the next, sometimes relating in conflict, sometimes in harmony.
The pictorial gestures, made between each layer, consist of contrasting brushstrokes; initially broad and expansive, eventually covered with meticulous details.
In addition to the compositional elements, Nardon’s works also conceptually incorporate the materials with which they are made. His color palette embodies the fundamental stages of the ancient alchemical Magnum Opus, featuring shades such as Nigredo (black), Albedo (white), Citrinitas (yellow), Rubedo (red) and Cauda Pavonis (peacock blue).
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..."
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.
First meteor, then comet and furnace, 2021
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
195 × 150 × 4 cm
Inquire
Waltz of a tracksuited ghost in the visiting room, 2020
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
200 × 145 cm
Inquire
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
195 × 168 × 3 cm
First meteor, then comet and furnace, 2021
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen
190 × 140 cm
My chest is a ghost dancing in a blazing garden, 2023
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
200 × 170 × 3 cm
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..."
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
shoulders,
feet,
knees,
palms.
Indigo veins dancing across the front shield.
Giant sport shoes covered with crushed chalk and laced up too tight. They look like two parallel altostratus full of rain.
50 chin-ups,
72 arrows,
125 sugar cubes, it is almost ripe.
A confused ghost with a light shadow floats across the low ceiling, and that’s ok.
I wrap him in a warm white towel that smells like bleach, and hide it in the hollow porcelain chest. A 7000 oz Styrofoam cup held upside down by a pale long hand.
Long lobes.
Long nose.
Long tears on long toes.
Three sips and I see your endless neck,
But I place your pretty face in the bottom left corner of my wingshaped amber lens.
And it seems so small now, today more than yesterday,
and even more than the day before yesterday.
A red clay soap-block in a tennis sock.
A glass eye on the porous floor of a small empty room where dusk is undulating.
Body weight. Broken smiles held with glue,
A strange color:
blue pruno blue.
Les mauvaises pensées - R1, 2019
Gesso, acrylic and pigments on canvas
217 × 164 cm
Inquire
Bodyweight training - B7, 2019
Gesso, acrylic, pigments on canvas
166 × 114 cm
Inquire
Les mauvaises pensées - B2, 2019
Gesso, acrylic and pigments on canvas
173 × 164 cm
Inquire
Les mauvaises pensées - B1, 2019
Gesso, acrylic, pigments on canvas
160 × 128 cm
Inquire
Pruno hermetic (Orion contrapposto) - Part 3, 2019
Painted terracotta, solid soap, sports sock and strings
Variable dimensions
Inquire
L’HIVER EN MARCEL
at Galerie Lily Robert, Paris, February 06 – March 12, 2019
By abstracting motifs and objects into reconfigurations, Nardon’s sculptures formalize the analogies of a prison cell. Nardon accesses penitential austerity and transcends necessity by using the objects desired and imagined by a prisoner, as foundations to propose final structures that are released of their functional substance. The objects that come to fruition are things that exist in the free world, reinvented as behind- bars mutations of themselves, then compressed to the limit of their symbolic power. In the allegorical plane, Nardon draws parallels between the state of captivity and the iconography of the Hanged Man from the Tarot de Marseille. Depicting a figure suspended upside down from one foot, the Hanged Man’s facial expression is one of indifference. This uncanny resignation to one’s own submission illustrates an orbit with two possible atmospheres which in itself creates stasis. In classical cartomancy, the Hanged Man activates an assertion of the reading—suggesting an alternative understanding of past, present and future which allows the viewer to ponder various avenues of temporal interpretation.
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
Édouard Nardon (b. 1978, Bordeaux) lives and works in New York City, USA.
Although they may seem like mere exercises in abstraction, Nardon’s paintings originate from precise figurative compositions rooted in personal fixations. Numerous small sketches on paper precede the work on canvas.
The paintings begin to reveal themselves when the artist outlines and composes repeated gestures on the chosen draft, using materials such as marble dust, gypsum and pigments. He then either reduces or enriches the work through a degree of unconscious separation, freeing himself from the original and literal meaning. As the accumulations start to take shape within their symbolic dimensions, the artist begins processing. Each layer, though seemingly heterogeneous, is kept at a distance from the next, sometimes relating in conflict, sometimes in harmony.
The pictorial gestures, made between each layer, consist of contrasting brushstrokes; initially broad and expansive, eventually covered with meticulous details.
In addition to the compositional elements, Nardon’s works also conceptually incorporate the materials with which they are made. His color palette embodies the fundamental stages of the ancient alchemical Magnum Opus, featuring shades such as Nigredo (black), Albedo (white), Citrinitas (yellow), Rubedo (red) and Cauda Pavonis (peacock blue).
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..."
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.
First meteor, then comet and furnace, 2021
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
195 × 150 × 4 cm
Inquire
Waltz of a tracksuited ghost in the visiting room, 2020
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
200 × 145 cm
Inquire
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
195 × 168 × 3 cm
Citrinitas, dawn on the intersection of his eyelashes and her lower lip, 2020
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
195 × 165 cm
Inquire
Citrinitas, dawn on the intersection of his radius and her plexus, 2020
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen
205 × 170 cm
Inquire
First meteor, then comet and furnace, 2021
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen
190 × 140 cm
My chest is a ghost dancing in a blazing garden, 2023
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
200 × 170 × 3 cm
Her temples behind her veil are like the two halves of a split pomegranate, 2021
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments, and oil on linen
185 × 140 cm
Inquire
I did one thousand pull-ups and my hands became two peacocks, 2020
Gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pigments and oil on linen
202 × 153 cm
Inquire
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..."
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
shoulders,
feet,
knees,
palms.
Indigo veins dancing across the front shield.
Giant sport shoes covered with crushed chalk and laced up too tight. They look like two parallel altostratus full of rain.
50 chin-ups,
72 arrows,
125 sugar cubes, it is almost ripe.
A confused ghost with a light shadow floats across the low ceiling, and that’s ok.
I wrap him in a warm white towel that smells like bleach, and hide it in the hollow porcelain chest. A 7000 oz Styrofoam cup held upside down by a pale long hand.
Long lobes.
Long nose.
Long tears on long toes.
Three sips and I see your endless neck,
But I place your pretty face in the bottom left corner of my wingshaped amber lens.
And it seems so small now, today more than yesterday,
and even more than the day before yesterday.
A red clay soap-block in a tennis sock.
A glass eye on the porous floor of a small empty room where dusk is undulating.
Body weight. Broken smiles held with glue,
A strange color:
blue pruno blue.
Les mauvaises pensées - R1, 2019
Gesso, acrylic and pigments on canvas
217 × 164 cm
Inquire
Bodyweight training - B7, 2019
Gesso, acrylic, pigments on canvas
166 × 114 cm
Inquire
Les mauvaises pensées - B2, 2019
Gesso, acrylic and pigments on canvas
173 × 164 cm
Inquire
Les mauvaises pensées - B1, 2019
Gesso, acrylic, pigments on canvas
160 × 128 cm
Inquire
Pruno hermetic (Orion contrapposto) - Part 2, 2019
Painted terracotta, pomegranate and strings
Variable dimensions
Inquire
Pruno hermetic (Orion contrapposto) - Part 1, 2019
marble, cement, wire, painted terracotta, scorpion, honey and strings
Variable dimensions
Inquire
Pruno hermetic (Orion contrapposto) - Part 3, 2019
Painted terracotta, solid soap, sports sock and strings
Variable dimensions
Inquire
L’HIVER EN MARCEL
at Galerie Lily Robert, Paris
February 06 – March 12, 2019
By abstracting motifs and objects into reconfigurations, Nardon’s sculptures formalize the analogies of a prison cell. Nardon accesses penitential austerity and transcends necessity by using the objects desired and imagined by a prisoner, as foundations to propose final structures that are released of their functional substance. The objects that come to fruition are things that exist in the free world, reinvented as behind- bars mutations of themselves, then compressed to the limit of their symbolic power. In the allegorical plane, Nardon draws parallels between the state of captivity and the iconography of the Hanged Man from the Tarot de Marseille. Depicting a figure suspended upside down from one foot, the Hanged Man’s facial expression is one of indifference. This uncanny resignation to one’s own submission illustrates an orbit with two possible atmospheres which in itself creates stasis. In classical cartomancy, the Hanged Man activates an assertion of the reading—suggesting an alternative understanding of past, present and future which allows the viewer to ponder various avenues of temporal interpretation.
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
The Address
Via Felice Cavallotti 5
25121, Brescia
info@theaddressgallery.com
Wed – Sat, 15-19
or by appointment
+39 3336800755
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Gallery
Via Felice Cavallotti 5, Brescia
Info@theaddressgallery.com
+39 333 680 0755
Opening Hours
Wed – Sat, 15-19