Jérôme Nadeau
Mercy, then metal

From September 4 to October 11, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montréal, is pleased to present Mercy, then metal an exhibition of new works by Jérôme Nadeau.

For his first exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto, Jérôme Nadeau continues his investigation into the modernist infrastructures of vision and promises of transparency. Working with found glass panels, all positioned at the same height despite their irregular widths and lengths, the glass sheets fragment the gaze, introduce unpredictable reflections and confront the viewer with their own role as observer. They become metaphors for the contemporary digital condition: interfaces that simulate transparency but, in reality, contaminate access to the image.

This engagement with glass as an interface mirrors the logic of Nadeau’s broader practice. Just as the panels fracture vision and complicate transparency, his work is shaped by a layered and iterative process that brings into relation material gestures and digital tools. He constructs images that embrace instability, repetition, and transformation. For this exhibition, the medium and the method converge, foregrounding how perception, whether architectural, optical, or digital, emerges through layers of translation and reinterpretation.

Nadeau’s process develops from a systematic approach to image-making and is built upon a vast studio archive – a visual matrix fueled by reverse image searches. Drawings inspired by motifs emerging from this constellation are regularly integrated into it. Each image produced, in turn, becomes a starting point, generating a self-referential cycle in constant expansion. Within this accumulation, this collision of languages, a productive tension emerges. Possibilities arise where contamination, chance, and acts of decision-making open onto forms of aesthetic emergence.  

The paintings in the exhibition unfold in several stages. Through these steps, images drift across mediums and states of being: drawings and photographs are scanned, compressed, translated into sound and back again, printed, altered, rescanned and over processed digitally before being screen-printed at the edge of legibility. The works seek neither to illustrate nor to stabilize, but rather to probe what wavers: the blurred thresholds of perception, zones of noise, surfaces contaminated by failure, error, and uncertainty. 

In failure lies something precious: forms that stumble in search of meaning, fragile motifs swaying between appearance and erasure. In these oscillations what remains is speculative, fractured, a space where recognition stutters and where doubt becomes a mode of reading. A final work does not arrive as resolution but as a hesitation, guided by intuition, where personal narratives echo in what is chosen, what is silenced, and what remains unresolved.