May 2 – June 7, 2014
Gallery 44 Vitrines
With the focus on materiality, disintegration, and the gesture of the artist, Jérôme Nadeau uses photography to contextually create what he refers to as “paintings”. The medium is the message, memory, and in turn, the memory is the message. Nadeau has built his practice around the usually undetected production process.
In RUINS, Nadeau creates artworks using an extracting process. He uses a technique that extracts the dyes and inks from images printed on chromogenic paper. It is then directly transferred to a sheet of undeveloped Fujicolour Chrystal Archive Paper and Kodak Endure paper. The result is an image that only exists in a visceral space and time. With an ephemeral notion, Nadeau creates images that only exist in a certain space where an object represents the past, but is also defiant of the indexical properties of the present image.
Jérôme Nadeau, Untitled from the series RUINS, 40 x 50 inches, 2014
In Foreseen and Unforeseen Uncertainty, Nadeau works with the chromogenic print process. All pigments are present in the paper before the exposure to light. The colour print process works through subtractive colour theory, meaning that white is created through the absence of pigment, and black through all pigments being present. The result is an image built directly on the paper, with no clear outcome. The abstraction of these images is what separates them from traditional capture-based method photography.
Maddy Tripp
*Exhibition information: May 2 – June 7, 2014. Gallery 44 Vitrines, 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tues – Sat 11 – 5 p.m.