Édouard Nardon
– The long invisible hand slowly
unlocks the tinted window

March 14 – April 30, 2025

We find ourselves in a refuge where everything exists in a time that is anything but definable, in terms of sequence and linearity. A time that belongs to the present as much as to the past, or even to the future.
A time that seems to have emerged by rummaging through the ashes of a landscape now unrecognizable, where nothing is an illusion, yet at the same time, there is the unsettling sensation of being prisoners inside an image, or of moving in an alien dream*. (*Antoine Volodine, Terminus Radioso, 2016)

In this refuge, we are uncertain presences, tolerated guests. One has the feeling of having insinuated oneself into a space that does not truly belong to us, of being tolerated in the silent waiting for a pretext to be banished. In the air vibrate the unwanted acoustic feedback from some distorters.

An hour, several weeks, few centuries: these are temporalities that we cannot attribute to any of the objects used by Edoardo Caimi (1989) in his artistic production, presented here, nor can we project our gaze onto them at a remote time, whether past or future. These temporal layers share an element in common, that is, the metamorphic function of fire, an element that has influenced the transformation of human social structures. The exhibition opens with Dream Burner (2024), a stove made from a pipe from which some dry poppy flowers emerge, and Among Your Embers (2024), the first of the two-dimensional works created in the last year of the artist’s activity, through the burning of Japanese paper on iron – fire on fire – and where some shiny aluminum plates are placed.

The result of this process, in which the combustion of Japanese paper becomes an act of writing, gives shape to a primitive alphabet traced by fire. This practice evokes ancient forms of oral transmission and ancestral rituals, suggesting a connection to the earth that manifests in an almost spiritual dimension. The burn marks seem to evoke fragments of archaic narratives, remnants of dark poems that surface through the very material. In SunDog (cross 1) / (cross 2) / (cross 3) (2024), a site-specific installation, some carbonized mandarins are offered; one of them appears to have been alchemically transformed into aluminum.

The references of this imagery seem to materialize in some signals capable of establishing an evidentiary paradigm, aimed at other forms of knowledge, signals that, in this case, allow us to decode a reality obscured by light. Some images of distant places, impossible to geolocate, appear within the exhibition project, as in Under a Pale Sun (2025), which confronts us with a completely distorted and mutating reality. Or in the photograph placed under the pillow in Every Night and Every Morn (2025): the memory of a distant place, on a camp bed held by agricultural pitchforks.

At the heart of this acoustic drift lies Where Are You, Dear General? (2025), a chair listening for a signal lost in time. Some dry maple leaves rest on its surface, barely vibrating, moved by an invisible echo. The radio waves emanating are not a clear transmission, but rather an irregular sound made of distorted guitars and indecipherable voices. It sounds like thunder whose echoes have crossed dark channels. It is the noise of uncertain advancement, of a body making its way through hostile matter. It recalls the sound of something that insists on existing.

Text by Arnold Braho