early installationVoices of Reason/Voices of Mad-
ness, 1983, as much as in the recent videoPara-
mour, 1998–1999, the viewer is offered close-ups of
female heads during an endlessly repeated frag-
mentary event, pregnant with an implied narrative
of psychic torment. In the first work, the viewer
steps before a color slide projection of a woman’s
head with only the eyes lighted, staring at the
opposite wall, where another woman’s head, in a
black-and-white projection, gradually dissolves
into a milky focus and an anguished expression.
Suddenly, the viewer is shocked by a loud shot,
and the face gradually returns to focus, to begin
again. In the second, the woman anxiously asks
again and again, ‘‘Haven’t you ever loved a
woman? Haven’t you ever desired a woman? Not
once, not for a single moment? Never, ever?’’ to be
answered each time by a male voice from behind the
viewer, ‘‘No, never.’’
However, Cadieux’s work cannot be enlisted to
feminism, as almost any label tends to oversimplify
the range and depth of her references. The woman’s
questions inParamour, for example, are derived
from a text of Marguerite Duras, an appropriation
of literary sources which Cadieux had previously
displayed inLa Blessure d’une cicatrice ou Les
Anges(The Wound of a Scar or The Angels), 1987.
In that large diptych, the left panel contained a
painted image of Le Petit Prince, hero of Saint-
Exupe ́ry’s famous children’s book, his features
effaced and with the inscription below ‘‘Voilale meilleur portrait que plus tard, j’ai re ́ussi a faire
de lui’’ [Here is the best portrait that I was later
able to make of him], while the right panel repro-
duced one of the most famous of theStoryville
Portraitsby E.J. Bellocq—a prostitute seen from
the rear, her head scratched out in the emulsion. In
Cadieux’s work, she seems to be drawing a butter-
fly on the wall. This juxtaposition, taken from two
volumes collected by Cadieux in what she called
her ‘‘archives,’’ combined and amended both lit-
erary and visual sources in a duality which proble-
matized portraiture and identity through metaphors
of inadequacy and scarring, and the conflation of
child, prostitute, and angel. That Cadieux was
suggesting an implicit damage or disability when
contemplating the sensitive self seems confirmed
by another work which also used the Petit Prince
quotation,A fleur de peau(On EdgeorSkin Deep),
- There, the left panel of the diptych repro-
duced the quotation in Braille, while the right was
a clouded mirror; a blind viewer would not see a
reflection in the mirror, while a sighted viewer
would not understand the Braille unaided, and
neither could easily decode the fragmentary or
elusive view of self, based as much on suggestible
memory as on immediate experience, into which
they were being drawn.
These examples also foreground two other
defining formal features of Cadieux’s work—its
multi-media range, including a crucial use of
often punning titles, and its intimate focus on
bodily damage or enlargement as an evocative
mechanism. She frequently uses blown-up scars
or parts of the body or skin contextualized by
positioning with landscape or architectural ele-
ments. For example, the instability of meaning in
titles such asLa Feˆlure, au choeur des corps, recalls
the postmodern insistence on language games, and
is matched with the surreal juxtaposition of two
giant lips kissing between two healed scars. This
intense interest in the body’s pleasures and the
marks of corporeal pain, linked to a size which
engenders a sense of both overwhelming force
and of powerless voyeurism, reflects other postmo-
dern fascinations. This work, constructed at room
size and displayed as Canada’s contribution at the
Venice Biennale of 1990, confirmed Cadieux’s
international stature. She has been exhibited exten-
sively in 13 countries in Europe as well as in
Canada, the United States, Japan, Brazil, and Aus-
tralia, and she has taught in France (1993–1994,
1996), Spain (1997), and in the United States
(1998) as well as Canada. Together with some
other Canadians such as Jeff Wall and Evergon,
she helped to define and influence a tendency
among young Canadian art photographers to use
large color photographic imagery to construct
ironic or surreal worlds.
However, no other Canadian has so effortlessly
moved between sculpture, painting, photography,
and video formats, appropriations, installations
with sound, and classic references to diptych, trip-
tych, and serial forms, all often connected to land-
scapes, interior or exterior architecture or specific
sites. She came to photography later in her artistic
training, underlining that, fundamentally, the pre-
sence of the artist is felt in her works more in the
concept, which determines medium and form, than
in the physical mark. This allows her to roam
between a very precise realism (e.g.,Elle, 1993, a
cast of her mother’s arm) and an evocative abstrac-
tion. The texture of the pores of the skin in many of
her works can seem indistinguishable from the
grain of photographic emulsion, an effect she
admits is deliberate. She also calls upon a range of
previous classical genres, from nudes to portraiture
to landscape, set within a range of social contexts,
from medicine to technology; but they are created
usually for a museum space which can tolerate andCADIEUX, GENEVIE`VE