Tête à tête avec Geneviève Cadieux

A monumental, solitary mouth, bright-red lips slightly open and trembling, fills a billboard installed on the roof of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. A formless, purplish bruise enlarged to the scale of a landscape is juxtaposed with a stormy sky. A couple under the inquisitive and invisible eyes of multiple cameras is absorbed in a mute choreography of gestures that say all after all has been said, and they each avoid the other’s eyes. A fabulous sea anemone floats in inky black as though in a dream. A lone, windswept tree. Then another, fifteen years later, literally petrified. The vertigo of a starry, uncanny night glimmering above the desert.

Of course, Geneviève Cadieux’s work extends beyond these few images that surprise the eyes and the imagination. Yet it possesses the unique quality of producing metaphors, affective symbols that stick to our skin and haunt us for a long time, at the whim of free association, sometimes even in our dreams. For this tête-à-tête with her, I wanted to discuss the appearance—I would even say the emergence—of various subjects and motifs in her work. We met at her solo exhibition, Wild Is the Wind, presented at Blouin Division gallery in fall 2024.

Ji-Yoon Han: Dear Geneviève, I’ll begin our conversation today by going back to a question I asked you in 2020, at the end of the interview we did for your solo exhibition at 1700 La Poste. Referring to Firmament (2020), the monumental work that you created for that show, I asked you if you knew what image would or could come after the abstract immensity of the starry sky. You said, “I don’t know, I’ll have to wait and see. I don’t know what will arise after this. Truly … I’m waiting. I have no idea, and I’m not anxious about it either.” Now we can see that the future image was that of the human brain. What paths led you from the sky to the brain? How did this motif, surprising to say the least, manifest itself or become necessary to you?