Geneviève Cadieux’s most recent exhibition opens with a fragment of the prose poem Body, remember, by the Greek poet from Alexandria Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933), a phrase written in large white letters on a huge section of wall in the Blouin Division gallery. It cannot be taken in at a glance; to understand and feel it, visitors will have to move around, read the letters and syllables… “My body, remember how much you were loved,” they will finally come to understand, grasping the very poignant meaning of this quote along the way. The way in which this phrase unfolds gives the entire exhibition an installation feel or, to take up one of the ideas mentioned by Cadieux, a cinematographic organization. But it is not the narrative structure of Hollywood cinema that is invoked here, but rather that of experimental cinema in its capacity to deconstruct an impoverishing linear narrative. It is the poetic power of words and images that is at stake here.
Ramifications
It must be said that Geneviève Cadieux has always developed much more than individual images, each exhibition being like a journey, a rich story. She has always developed her corpus with subtle and intelligent plays on resemblances, dissimilarities, repetitions, doublings, visual rhymes… In a second room, two negative photos of “ghost flowers”, single-flowered monotropes – plants that find their energy in the network of tree roots and fungi with which they share ramifications – echo each other with just a few subtle variations. These images of white flowers without chlorophyll, which seem faded, play here on the register of the same and the different. And they are not the only images in this exhibition to proceed in this way.
Moreover, since his beginnings, Cadieux has always worked to incorporate the space around his works, creating dialogues between them in his exhibitions, even establishing echoes with his old creations. Here, for example, this sentence from Cavafy evokes Abandon (2015), a sound installation where we could hear Anne-Marie Cadieux reciting this same poem… This is what made Cadieux’s exhibitions so rich, the very sensitive attention to space and to resonances with other works, including her own.
Cadieux has also accustomed us to works that speak of emotions and memory. This is also the case here. Art historian and curator Ji-Yoon Han explains in her presentation text that “Cadieux’s work is always about writing a visual history of passions”. This exhibition speaks of love, of remembrance, of the possibility of reactivating past emotions through the feelings of the body… One of the last rooms is very moving in this respect. It offers six imposing images that are reminiscent of flowers, but which are in fact taken from digital medical imaging of a brain. We see networks of synapses enhanced with gold and palladium leaf. These images seem to evoke the desire to scientifically grasp the chemistry of love, the magical paths of emotions in our brains. But it is rather a question of insisting on the poetic power of memory and the body, of practicing an alchemy of memory, memory which becomes, to take up an idea of Paul Valéry, like a force of poetics, force of creative conduct…
Grandmaison
Halfway through, the Cadieux exhibition gives way to the presentation of works by Pascal Grandmaison. Another dialogue for other ramifications. The visitor will also see plants and flowers that Grandmaison has been growing for over 15 years with ancestral seeds. They also evoke evanescence and memory in the way they are presented. They are all bathed in an orange color that brings to mind old photos, a certain pictorialism from the beginning of the 20th century.e century. Grandmaison explains that he actually took the color from the very last seconds of the sunset. These images seem to speak of a cycle of time, of life, death and rebirth…