Nikita Kadan — Galerie Poggi, Paris
Poignant in its way of using symbols and the gravity of bodies to transcend tragedy, Nikita Kadan’s work brings to Galerie Poggi his powerful meditation on violence and its transfiguration through art.
Behind the veil that opens the exhibition is born the first unease of a theatricality whose fabric one cannot tell whether it acts as ornament or serves to conceal from sight the desolation of reality.
Nothing is obvious, nothing illustrative; everything moves along the ambiguous line of the trace, of the imprint. And of the silence of ruin. In this exhibition of vulnerability and wounding (large charcoal drawings on paper, dense oils, cold metal structures or sound installations), the crash has left the stage; only the materiality of the shock remains. In the flesh, the ruins persist—unless it is the other way around.
The counterpoint presence of Kazimir Malevich, in a discreet dialogue, highlights the historical dimension of art’s gaze and the unease of its representation. That of minimalist lines, of signs resembling a wounded, tottering abstraction meant to evoke the weight of damaged conditions. The avant-garde escapes nostalgia; it is the only possible return through which to think the aftermath. For if war surfaces in every image, it is not a subject but a state of being. In this sense, Kadan explores the trace of conflict as a geologist works to identify the strata of a soil whose collapses shape identity, where every point on the surface echoes the vibration of a history written elsewhere and which the victim can only read, inhabit—and perhaps haunt.
For Kadan’s work lies entirely within this complex tension between homage to persistence and the faint hope of a possible alteration of this aberration. Is it a final salute to the victims of violence, or a possibility of believing in an elsewhere through art? Both, no doubt. Neither consolation nor monumentalization of tragedy: the in-between is uncertain, and memory, so vivid, prevents death from having the last word.
Thus, in all sobriety, faces follow limbs, details accumulate in a slowness that breaks the temptation of the image; the charcoal crumbles and softens the passage of time. A new geology of matter emerges here, where the wound does not close; the simplicity of gesture, the restraint of form impose their balance between gravity and resistance and hold in view this present that does not pass, where the languor of death cannot be the only escape.
Lana Dali & Guillaume Benoit
Nikita Kadan, Rubble Flower — From Wednesday, October 22 to Saturday, December 20, 2025 — Galerie Poggi, 135, rue Saint Martin, 75004 Paris
