2024 | GENEVIÈVE CADIEUX
WILD IS THE WIND
MONTRÉAL
Sept 12 - Oct 22, 2024

Blouin Division is excited to unveil Wild is the Wind, an exhibition highlighting Geneviève Cadieux’s recent works.

How can one make passions visible without depicting the people who are affected by them? What images could embody the energy that drives us, the flow of our thoughts, or the emotions that influence us? What are the visual paths by which desire moves within me and moves me? In her exhibition Wild Is the Wind, Geneviève Cadieux invites us to explore an unprecedented territory that is both intimate and impenetrable, which she refers to as “the locus of the mind.” No Map of Tendre can guide us through such elusive realms; instead, one must submit to the magnetic pull of select symbols, phrases, echoes, and flashes of light, which act as compasses to lead the way.

One such work is Corps aimé (2024), where embossed letters stretch along an entire wall: “Mon corps souviens-toi combien tu fus aimé” [Body, remember how much you were loved]. This directive from the mind to the body, a quote from Greek poet Constantin Cavafy, can only be deciphered as our own body moves through the gallery. By making us walk through the sentence as if it were a landscape, the work awakens the memory of the voluptuous body. It also evokes the memory of an earlier work by Cadieux, Abandon (2015), a sound piece without images in which a female voice—the artist’s sister—makes the incandescent poem resonate in the intimate space of a nook.

In contrast, the new photographic series Lieu de l’esprit (2024) and Fragments d’esprit (2024) present mesmerizing images of a human brain and living cortical tissue, transformed into fiery, vibrant bushes through the application of gold, palladium, and colored silver leaf. These images are further multiplied and amplified to evoke a swarm of shooting stars, some distant galaxy, or a fragment of the cosmos. In the artist’s words, “I have intuitively been drawn to the correspondences and poetic relationships between the human brain and the cosmos, as they are the most unknown spaces for the human mind.” Just as the sculptural approach to text, the almost pictorial approach of medical imaging not only calls for our visual attention but also involves our entire body in the presence of the images. A moving body. A caressing one.

While the new works turn towards an unprecedented form of innerness, Cadieux’s art continuously writes a visual history of passions. For forty years, her photographic work has revealed the sensitive surface of the skin as one develops a film, magnified the bruises of the body on the scale of twilight skies, and presented desert landscapes as places of optical rapture and bodily surrender. Today again, a feverish desire to create images permeates the invisible and formless locus of the mind. And wild is the wind, as the song goes, for we’re like creatures of the wind, for we’re like creatures in the wind.

Ji-Yoon Han
(translated by Mathilde Bertrand Pilon)