Crab claws, flowers, charred book, or snowy mountain: Cadio\u2019s paintings deal with multiple subjects that act as catalysts for images with sombre tonalities, traversed here and there by clear, luminous bursts. They find coherence through a fairly muted colour palette combined with tight, even elliptical framing. Cadio\u2019s stylistic choices confine the objects depicted behind closed doors. No distractions or escape routes remain. Our eye butts up against the frontality of the compositions and their shallow depth of field. In Le Ciel et l\u2019Arcadie<\/em> (2017), a bouquet is scattered on the ground in a tangle of branches, petals, and withered leaves. A cold, white light illuminates the centre of the canvas, fighting with the shadow covering it. In the bottom third of the painting, the stems stand out feverishly against the background, demarcating an area of profound darkness, like a precipice positioning the scene on the edge of collapse. This dynamic recurs in Crumble<\/em> (2018\u20132019). Here, the hues alternate between crimson, greyish beige, and rosewood, colouring a pile of dried flowers, some of which look like empty shells, as though in the process of becoming fossilized. In 1933<\/em>(2016), the pages of a burnt book create the appearance of geological strata. Our eye cuts across them to discern, on the right, the barely visible detail of a reproduction of Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix\u2019s Liberty Leading the People<\/em>. Pushed almost entirely out of the frame, this famous image no longer inspires any hope here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Damien Cadio<\/strong>
Le Ciel et l\u2019Arcadie<\/em>, 190 \u00d7 140 cm, 2017. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ SOCAN, Montreal (2021)
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Damien Cadio<\/strong>
La G\u00e9ante<\/em>, 190 \u00d7 140 cm, 2016. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ SOCAN, Montreal (2021)
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Cadio paints scenes pushed to their tipping point. His floral still lifes indirectly consider the definition of the genre itself and its various European translations throughout history. Often fading, but rarely completely withered, they evoke both something that is dying and a crystallized moment when everything is \u201cstill alive, \u201d as one might understand in the English expression still life<\/em>, in which still<\/em> means immobile. The distillation of their settings also recalls the \u201csilent life\u201d of the Dutch term stilleven<\/em>. These paintings reveal the persistence of a genre long regarded as minor. They retain an allegorical power, since in addition to consider- ing the status of painting, they reveal a nature in decline, evoking the current environmental crisis. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The canvases bear the traces of a catastrophe grasped in its polysemic essence. The term \u201ccatastrophe, \u201d which comes from theatre, refers both to the denouement of a tragedy and to the new configuration it generates. Gr\u00e9gory Quenet adds that it refers to \u201ca discourse of the after, as a catastrophe is not perceived as such at the moment it occurs.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Gr\u00e9gory Quenet, \u201cLa catastrophe, un objet historique?, \u201d Hypoth\u00e8ses<\/em>, no. 3 (2000): 17 (our translation). 17.<\/span>significance.\u201d The landscapes represented in Endless Summer<\/em> and Daylight<\/em> (2020) underscore a similar tension. In these two views of a forest, the vanishing point is situated in the blaze on the horizon, in the flames of a violent fire that has already caused significant destruction. Above the treetops, we see plumes of smoke rising in clouds of ash and soot. These paintings urge an awareness of the recurring disasters of the Anthropocene. Although they don\u2019t refer to specific places or events, the images resonate with the constant flow of information spread by media networks and digital devices. They appear in their disturbing ordinariness, the result no longer of extraordinary events but of seasonal resurgences in the newsfeed. Treated equally by Cadio, the landscapes, flowers, and artefacts create a collection that is paradoxically heterogeneous and homogeneous and an open response to the daily turbulences and collisions of our world of images. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Damien Cadio<\/strong>
Daylight,<\/em> 190 \u00d7 140 cm, 2020. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ SOCAN, Montreal (2021)
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Damien Cadio<\/strong>
1933, <\/em>s\u00e9rie Nuit de l\u2019Histoire series<\/em>, 37 \u00d7 20 cm, 2016. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ SOCAN, Montreal (2021)
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This diversity and these clashes are appar- ent from the very genesis of his paintings, through the dense atlas of images \u2014 taken from the Internet or from personal photographs \u2014 from which Cadio draws his inspiration. Although the variety of iconographical sources may at times muddy the waters, the scenes depicted often resonate in our collective memory and therefore seem to take over from history painting. Here, the facts are no longer celebrated in triumph but, instead, relegated to the background or even outside the image. With deliberate anachronism, these paintings replay the transition that occurred in German and British Romanticism from the late eighteenth^{‘<\/sup> to the early nineteenth^{‘<\/sup>century. They remind us that history resurfaces as much in the undergrowth as in the tragic spectacle of the battlefields. Then and now, this turn asks us to be wary of obtrusive discourse and stir up what hides in its shadow. In the Nuit de l\u2019Histoire<\/em> series, the titles of the paintings mark out the years. Yet, no obvious narrative emerges, as these small temporal clues are not sufficient to describe the facts implicitly contained in the selected images. It\u2019s a question not of silencing these elements, but of showing how details such as the CD-ROM that sparked a political scandal, the inscrutable face of a French politician, or the climb through a snow-covered mountain pass have been forgotten or ousted from the visual writing of the official history. Cadio\u2019s paintings, therefore, are not talkative, since they reflect the silenced margins that we still need to fill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n}}
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Damien Cadio<\/strong>
All Seedless in the Light<\/em>, 190 \u00d7 140 cm, 2019. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ SOCAN, Montreal (2021)
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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These decontextualized fragments become unique subjects of study, transfigured by a controlled pictorial gesture. Reactivating past genres, Cadio decompartmentalizes academic hierarchies and subverts the relationship between the subject and its form. His works, alternating between small and large formats, assume the formal strategies of still life and of landscape or history painting equally well. This disruption of the canons thwarts historical apriorism. The cut flowers represented in La G\u00e9ante<\/em> (2016), which flirt with the portrait, are in dialogue with the cavernous face emerging on the vase. The open book transposed to a large format of 190 cm \u00d7 140 cm in All Seedless in the Light<\/em> (2020) becomes a vast d\u00e9cor that compels our gaze and body in an oscillating dance between near and far. At first, we are absorbed by the style of the overall composition, which, nearing hyperrealism, rejects all expressionistic forms. Then, when we observe the canvas up close, the eye-catching details fade into the colour masses, revealing the fluid touch and smooth texture covering the ground. Through a skilful mise en abyme of his own still lifes, the artist argues that he seeks not to reproduce images but to make a painting capable of questioning the contemporary perception of the world. ~~<\/s> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n~~
By placing our representations in crisis or by approaching history via its grey areas, Cadio points to the feverish state of our current moment. As philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues, now it\u2019s no longer a question of polishing the splendour of the past, but of breaking \u201cthe vertebrae of [our] time^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Giorgio Agamben, \u201cWhat Is the Contemporary?<\/em> \u201d in What Is an Apparatus?, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 52. 38.<\/span>\u201d so as to shed light on, if not the austerity, at least the obscurity of the present. The paintings examined here seem to adopt a melancholic view of our era, characterized by a constant return to the past and a concurrent passion for archives. They take a transverse path in order to elude the inherited conservative dogmas of narratives and academic hierarchies whose overriding power persists. Triggering this melancholy does not mean taking up the meaning commonly understood today of a depressed mood. On the contrary, for sociologist Denilson Lopes Silva, this attitude allows us to revive \u201ca past that is constantly lost, a present covered in ruins, and a future emptied of any utopic^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Denilson Lopes Silva, \u201cL\u2019actualit\u00e9 de la m\u00e9lancolie\u201d in Passion du pass\u00e9 : Recyclages de la m\u00e9moire et usages de l\u2019oubli<\/em>, ed. Marie- Pascale Huglo, \u00c9ric M\u00e9choulan and Walter Moser (Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 2000), 95 (our translation). 95.<\/span>significance.\u201d Like fuel, Cadio\u2019s paintings spark this melancholic relationship with time and, in so doing, fertilize myriad horizons for the gaze and thinking alike. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
~~Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n~~
Damien Cadio, Thomas Fort<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The recent paintings of Damien Cadio\u2014from the floral still lifes to Nuit de l\u2019Histoire, both series ongoing since 2016 \u2014 make up a decaying panorama of residual figures, like meagre scraps surviving in the shadows of grandiose situations. By revealing a world under the yoke of entropy, his works reflect on the stakes of painting while also exploring the contemporary crisis of representation. Without turning into narrative or illustration, his paintings stage a terrain in which, in the words of anthropologist Marc Aug\u00e9, we \u201cmake our thoughts [NOTE count=1]angry.\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Marc Aug\u00e9, Oblivion, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 9. 2 [1998] 13.[\/REF]In stark contrast to the dramatic increase in the flow of capital, goods, and people, Cadio\u2019s paintings offer a slow, almost out-of-phase temporality. In so doing, they propose a critical view of the exponential networks of globalized appearances. By offering a few silent fragments, they maintain a fundamentally contemporary language. <\/br>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4425,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[338],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[971],"artistes":[1815],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-4436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-102-reseeing-painting","auteurs-thomas-fort-en","artistes-damien-cadio-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4436"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271601,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions\/271601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=4436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}