Olivier Cadiot's 'Un mage en été' Explores Fluidity and Memory

Olivier Cadiot's book 'Un mage en été' opens with Nan Goldin's photograph 'Sharon in the River', depicting a woman half in sun, half in shade. The 'mage' is the narrator who describes the scene, creating a moving, unpredictable line that traces the bather's curves. This figure acts as a net that captures and reveals, drawing on childhood echoes, emptying drawers, and dismantling mechanisms linked to texts, spaces, and times. The work, composed of a monologue and various images, resists fixed structure through instability and energy. It embraces indecision, oscillating between fluidity and turbulence, illusion and realism. Swimming and diving motifs recur, along with gliding and splashing, surface availability and depth. Cadiot produces knots of resistance and ruptures, ensuring passages that evoke emotion and sudden swerves with humor. The journey expands toward a reconquest of lost felicity, touching a sharp secret. Only a mage entering cold river water to meet a bather sparkling with water and sun could meet such a challenge. The text was published by artpress in September 2010.