It had been more than 20 years since Geneviève Cadieux had exhibited in New York. The last time was in 2000, at the Americas Society, for an exhibition curated by Stéphane Aquin, who has since become director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. This time, it is in the spaces that the Arsenal gallery has there that the artist, who works in Montreal, has installed nine works.
The exhibition Surrender is organized around a photo of the artist’s mother, taken in 1991, which is placed as a counterpart to the photo of an oyster… It must be said that this old photo of his mother is extraordinary, mysterious , disturbing and beautiful at the same time. One of the pearls of the artist’s corpus. The oyster facing him then appears as the symbol of the creative act, a bit like the work of childbirth.
This idea of returning to older images or ideas and reinserting them into a more recent or unpublished corpus is particularly strong. Cadieux had already done this recently at the 1700 La Poste Exhibition Center in Montreal.
The visitor will notice that this exhibition is in fact presented as a journey through the artist’s work; other references to ancient works are revealed there, including that of its creation about the Little Prince. But it is also intended as an exploratory trip, a bit like the research trip that the artist made a few years ago in Texas.
Moreover, we start with the image of a Yucca brevifolia found in the desert near Marfa. Is the exhibition like an emotional journey on creation?
“The exhibition begins in the middle of the night in the Marfa desert and ends at dawn with single tree on the Ghost Range, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the place that inspired Georgia O’Keeffe so much, says curator Anaïs Castro. We wanted to transport the visitor for a night, when the body surrenders to the mind. Hence the title of the exhibition, Surrender. »
An exhibition of great sensitivity, with a number of underground links, even if we are not sure that the shape of the Arsenal gallery in New York, which is almost a long corridor, really suits the works of Cadieux, which require an important space for dialogue.
He is therefore happy to hear that Arsenal NY will soon be moving to larger premises. From next fall, it will be located above the Artists Space center, in Tribeca, a district that has established itself for several years as the new effervescent place for contemporary art galleries. Chelsea — with its glitzy galleries — and the Lower East Side which has been withering for quite some time now…