Geneviève Cadieux
Surrender
Mar 12 - Apr 23, 2022
Geneviève Cadieux, L’esprit de la perle, 2020, inkjet print and palladium leaf, 84 x 108 in
In the spring of 2021, Geneviève Cadieux installed her largest public work to date, on the façade of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Barcelone, originally shot in 2003, serializes two figures aspiring to meet but somehow missing. The piece was named after a dream of Cadieux’s, with the title evoking isolation (“alone” phonetically present in the word) and the desire to connect. The figures (one of them Cadieux’s sister) appear to rhythmically converge and shift along the length of the iconic gallery’s promenade, both devoted to and distant from one another—as we have been, ourselves.
In her work, Cadieux has long pursued the pleasure and suffering of an encounter. But with Surrender, her first solo exhibition in New York in two decades, Cadieux grounds us in our cycles of relation, in our perpetual reaching for one another. This longing is most present in the portrait of her mother, (Ma mère, 1991-2020), but this same motivation animates the oyster that carefully coats the grain of sand to form a pearl, the moon that creates the tides, the trees that bear fruit. It’s in the sea that touches the sky and the climate between them—something both ephemeral and lasting. How is time experienced in a photograph, or held inside a blown-glass souffle? How does the movement of water become celestial through the detailed application of palladium leaf, in the very act of tracing?
Cadieux often frames the human body as landscape, but in recent years landscape has more veritably taken root in her practice. She approaches it, naturally, through portraiture. In Luna, 2016, a single connection point is established, a beckoning or becoming as the moon rises over the dunes, seemingly just for us. In Arbre seul (à l'aube), 2018, we alight on a starry, swimming, and alchemical portrait of a famed tree that enraptured Georgia O’Keeffe. Inhabiting terrain famous for artistic self-exile and inquiry, Cadieux lends the landscape an air of celebrity, as itself—not as backdrop, but as figure immemorial, as permanence. And in Fleur noire, 2022, we glance on a frond that, in a flash, requires we look deeper, accept it as undeniable, as exquisite in its originality. The ephemeral made perpetual, a meeting point achieved.
- Sky Goodden
Arsenal Contemporary Art New York thanks Musée d'art de Joliette for their loan of Geneviève Cadieux’s sculpture, Souffle, 1996.
Geneviève Cadieux (b. 1955) lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. Solo exhibitions include, the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Nouveau-Musée de Villeurbanne, the MUKA (Antwerp), the Bonner Kunstverein (Bonn), the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Sagacho Archive (Tokyo), Tate (London), the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Arts, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and the Americas Society (New York).