Jérôme Nadeau
A Good Sleeper

From April 8 to May 23, 2026

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present A Good Sleeper, a reiteration of the exhibition Mercy, then Metal presented at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto, in the fall of 2025, with additional works.

Nadeau’s approach is grounded in a systematic method of image production. It develops from a vast visual matrix nourished by reverse image searches. Drawings and photographs, inspired by motifs drawn from this constellation, are regularly integrated into it. Each image produced in turn becomes a point of departure for further inquiries, generating a self-referential cycle in constant expansion. From this accumulation, from this collision of visual languages, a productive tension emerges. Possibilities arise where contamination, chance, and choice never assert themselves as resolution, but rather as a threshold, guided by intuition, where personal narratives resonate in what is retained, discarded, or left unresolved.

The paintings brought together for the exhibition are developed through multiple phases. Across this process, images slip and transform from one state to another: drawings and photographs are digitized, compressed, translated into sound, then reconverted, printed, altered, scanned, and digitally reconfigured before being screen-printed at the limits of legibility. The works do not seek to illustrate or stabilize, but rather to probe what wavers: the blurred thresholds of perception, zones of noise, surfaces contaminated by error and uncertainty.

There is a moment before sleep when the room withdraws, when the mind loosens its grip. The eyes keep working, refusing to dark. Relieved of its task, they begin to produce what it contains: perception collapsing inward and beginning to reveal its architecture. Faint shimmers oscillate then return. An ecology of flicker and delay, granular drifts, luminous pulses, specks of microscopic debris, cobwebs of neurons misfiring politely. The system senses itself. Vision containing its own ruins. What emerges no longer pertains to the object, nor to the visible as something to be confirmed. It is an unstable field, without a point of reference. Private appearances that respond to nothing external, evading capture and resisting narrative. The glass panels beneath the works place two functions in tension: seeing through, and seeing return. Between the image and the gaze, a surface operates. Access wavers, partially parasited. - Jérôme Nadeau

Jérôme Nadeau lives and works in Montréal (QC). He has an MFA in photography from Concordia University (2016). His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions notably at LVH (London, UK, 2024), Eolith (2023), Fondation Grantham (2022), Galerie Nicolas Robert (2019, 2021), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2020), Galerie René Blouin (2018), Occurrences (Montréal, 2016), Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen (2016), Battat Contemporary (2016), Parisian Laundry (2016), Gallery 44 (2014) and Gallery Monitor (Gothenburg, Suède, 2014). He is the recipient of the Mildred Lande and Margot Lande Fellowship in Photography (2013) and Roloff Beny Fellowship in Photography (2015). Jérôme Nadeau is also the founder and co-director of soon.tw, a publishing house and contemporary art space.