Cathy Jardon / Chiaroscuro

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Cathy Jardon (born in 1979 /lives and works in Berlin) has established herself as a painter developing an abstract geometric vocabulary that never ceases to question the very notion of image. From a grammar of restricted figures, by summoning a palette of colors of an incredible richness, she builds works of an exceptional rigor already present in some prestigious institutions across the Rhine. This form of geometry, far from being a new variation on the possibilities of abstraction, proposes on the contrary images that play on the different springs of perception, whether they are linked to our Western culture or conditioned by the neuronal reading that our brain makes of them. Although her work has been recognized in Berlin for the past ten years, she has not had a major exhibition in France for over a decade. This first presentation in Paris displays both old works based on the principle of the frame and the line and her recent creations that reintroduce the notions of perspective, light and volume. For this occasion, the artist is unveiling for the first time an exceptional group of preparatory sketches covering her entire career. These works on paper are a counterpoint to a series of figurative sketches capturing her loved ones in ordinary situations. If accuracy takes a resolutely abstract turn in her paintings, it becomes in these drawings, which have remained secret, a subjective way of questioning in a different way, and by other means, the current issues of the contemporary image.