BRUNO GADENNE: ELDORADO

OPENING : THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 AT 6 PM

Bruno Gadenne paints the way one explores: with patience, precision, and a certain luminous obsession. For the past decade, his solo expeditions have taken him deep into the tropical forests of Asia and Latin America. On foot or by canoe, notebook and camera at the ready, he ventures into the jungle to capture what doesn’t immediately show itself: a fleeting reflection, a break in the canopy, an improbable shimmer of light.

These journeys form the bedrock of his painting. But once back in the studio, Gadenne doesn’t document—he reconstructs. Drawing from his notes, his memory, and the unease these landscapes stir in him, he composes scenes imbued with a quiet strangeness. A plant too pale, a light too unreal, a fleeting figure—everything appears faithful to nature, and yet something is off. The image is clear, precise, but what it reveals spills beyond the real.

Caught between naturalism and unreality, his work aligns with a broader history of landscape painting—not as a reproduction of place, but as a mental projection, almost a hallucination. Like the Romantics or the Symbolists, Gadenne shifts from observation to vision. But he does so with a sharp awareness of his own gaze. He knows what it means, in the Western tradition, to paint “the jungle”: a space long imagined, exoticized, turned into a scene of wilderness or conquest.

Here, nothing of the sort. No exoticism, no postcard fantasies. His painting roots itself in a form of embodied presence—a slow, attentive immersion where humans, plants, animals, and elements appear linked by invisible threads. The goal is not to freeze a landscape, but to express a relationship: the kind you build with a place when you stop looking at it from a distance. The world ceases to be a backdrop and becomes a living environment.

For his first solo exhibition at Galerie Prima, Bruno Gadenne presents a new series of oil paintings inspired by recent travels through Central America and Borneo. Titled Eldorado, the exhibition unveils a lush, layered nature shot through with golden flashes—at once alluring and deceptive.

The title, deliberately ambiguous, evokes both the myth and its reversal. Eldorado—that dream of the conquistadors, the illusion of boundless gold hidden in the forests. In Gadenne’s work, the mirage returns, only to be upended. Here, gold isn’t something to seize—it’s a false light, a riddle, an invitation to get lost.

We encounter dense undergrowth pierced by opaque glows, still pools that mirror the sky, and a pair of bare feet seemingly set ablaze against the forest floor. Nothing is fully explained, but everything hums with a sensory tension. The viewer isn’t guided—they’re drawn in.

Eldorado unfolds like a mental drift: an unfindable place, unmapped, where each painting becomes a clue or trace. The exhibition invites us to surrender our bearings in a heightened, at times disquieting, version of nature—and to yield to the slow, hypnotic rhythm of painting.