Blue Pruno Blue: Édouard Nardon at The Address Gallery

In “Blue Pruno Blue” (on view through November 3), Nardon takes what’s known as a “prison workout” into example. Viewed one way, this is an expenditure of energy within a closed system over a particular temporal period, useful mainly within incarcerated boundaries. It functions as a result of its own laws, systems and hierarchies and in this, draws on limited materials at hand. Prison systems can be constructive or entropic and they frequently involve power. There’s nothing inherently unique about a prison workout and it’s said that six exercises can generate between fifty to one-hundred variations. This kind of repetition is a function of most generic bodyweight training, as a set of physical exercises marked by, in this instance, a particularly unfortunate common circumstance.

Knowledge, too, can be discreet to one situation, set or arrangement. Once something is learned it’s impossible for it to be unlearned. You can forget something but you can’t erase it. Like doing the splits, the adding of layers in painting can also subtract, divesting knowledge. Unstretched, raw canvas, unable to “take” erasure, facilitates Nardon’s compounding process. The application and orientation of visual materials might be seen as an exercise in control, itself a loose variety of power. Nothing can be undone, but instead cancelled or covered with the addition of cumulative elements: paint, plaster, cement, clay, glycerine soap base, soap bars, hiking ropes, industrial found objects.

“Blue Pruno Blue” can’t exist, or it can only exist in the mind, like a mood.