Tropical Insomnia, 2022

Tropical Insomnia

December 2nd, 2019. Belize
Still no jaguar in sight, but I can feel I’m being watched.
Travel diary, B. Gadenne

For his first solo exhibition at the Dumonteil Gallery in Shanghai, French artist Bruno Gadenne is
presenting a series of nocturnal scenes created after a 3 months trip in Central America.
Marching in the footsteps of Gauguin, Delacroix, Sargent and so many others, Bruno
Gadenne renews the long tradition of the travelling painter. In the winter of 2019, he retraced the
itinerary of explorers Stephens and Catherwood deep into the jungle of Honduras and Guatemala,
who re-discovered many lost Mayan cities and temples. Travelling very light but for a small
backpack filled with gouache painting materials, a machete and a hammock, B. Gadenne collected
images of the primary forest that helped him create large-scale oil paintings once back in his
Parisian studio.
«To track is a shamanic phenomenon : a kind of spiritual displacement into the body of the
animal »
Sur la piste animale, Baptiste Morizot
As in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s movie Tropical Malady, which the title of the exhibition is
directly paying homage to, we follow our protagonist, here painter Bruno Gadenne, deep into the
jungle where he experiences near-mystical encounterings, the tiger of the movie replaced here by
the always-out-of-sight jaguar. Traces of wild animals are directly visible as in “The path”, where
the spectator is invited to follow the prints of a large jaguar, leading us ever deeper into the dark and
lush vegetation.
The landscape depicted here is indeed sparsely inhabited: a couple of figures, the human shown as
another animal in its natural habitat. In “The Watch”, the figure (a self portrait since the artist,
travelling solo, is his own model) is looking straight at us, spying behind a floating log, watching
over his territory. He seems at the same time threatening, and ready to disappear under the muddy
waters. But even in the figureless landscapes, a lingering presence can be sensed, emanating from
the layers of oil painting, behind the numerous brushstrokes rendering the leaves. The trees
themselves become protagonists of the scenes, an ominous face-to-face in the heart of the jungle,
far from any civilization but for the ruins of Mayan pyramids. The wall of trees is hiding something,
at the same time inviting and menacing.

January 7th, 2020. Guatemala
Today I visited the caves in the cliffs above the Rio Dulce. I covered myself in mineral-rich mud,
and spent an hour floating in the warm water of the natural hot springs under a fine rain.
Everything is very quiet.
Travel diary, B. Gadenne

Peaceful scenes like “The Prince’s Waterfall” depicting a deer at a pond invite us to a silent
contemplation, for fear of breaking the spell of this calm apparition. In his paintings, the artist often
pulls the attention from the figures back to the landscapes through his use of contrast in the lights
and colors, and the dense rendition of plants and water, our gaze always going back and forth
between the figures and the landscape they are part of.

February 3rd, 2020. Honduras
The path keeps going up for more than one hour, it’s exhausting. Beautiful waterfalls cross the
path here and there. Half the trek is done within a cloud here on top of the forested mountain,
creating a strange atmosphere in the jungle, blurring its vines, its palm trees, its ferns.
Travel diary, B. Gadenne

The rendering of light in Gadenne’s painting is often intriguing. We can not really tell what time of
day or night it is: the scenes are shrouded in a bluish wash, when it’s not altogether an intriguing
blood-red atmosphere like a cosmic anomaly, part apocalyptic, part redemption. The fog in the
painting “The Queens” adds mystery to the elegantly crowned tree-ferns, hovering above the
undergrowth of the misty forest.

“One has to hope that a diplomat gone into the woods to meet other living creatures […] comes
back transformed, calmly feral, far from the whimsical savagery attributed to others. That the
one who let himself run wild with them comes back a little bit different from his “weretravel”[
like a werewolf]: a mixed-blood, straddling between two worlds. Nor sinful nor
purified, just other and capable of slightly travelling between the worlds, and trying to get them
to communicate, in order to implement a common world.”
Sur la piste animale, Baptiste Morizot

Bruno Gadenne is a “diplomat”, as coined by philosopher/tracker Baptiste Morizot: an ambassador
of the tropical forests to the city dwellers, someone trying to bridge the gap between the artificial
world of humans and the wildness of the animal one. Through his travels and the resulting
paintings, the artist acts as a contemporary shaman, bringing the sights of primeval forests back into
our busy cities. Questioning our relationship with Nature, he leads us back not at the center but as a
part of the grand scheme of the natural world.