Damien Cadio, Des horizons

Crab claws, flowers, charred book, or snowy mountain: Cadio’s 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’s 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’Arcadie (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 (2018–2019). 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(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 Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Pushed almost entirely out of the frame, this famous image no longer inspires any hope here.