Paysages Imaginaires

Chandler House is delighted to introduce to Cape Town the paintings of French artist Hugo Caddous, who will be having his debut exhibition in the Voorkamer Gallery for the month of April.

“Every landscape is a state of mind.” – Henri-Frédéric Amiel.

Always a lover of nature, Caddous had planned to spend his life working with animals, but in 1998 he did a drawing class at Jussieu University, Paris, and has since never looked back. After studying engraving at Ecole Estienne and later at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Caddous worked, amongst other things, as a textile and graphic designer before founding his drawing studio Caddous & Alvarez with fellow artist Cécile Alvarez. While working with established names in the fields of interior design and luxury fashion to create bespoke frescoes and wallpapers, Caddous has painted more personal work, in parallel. It is from this artistic journey that this exhibition originates.

Artist Statement:

For this Imaginary Landscapes series, each painting was conceived as an idealized landscape; immaculate and untouched by the hand of the man. My works are built from slivers of memories, from visions moments in the past. What remains in the present is a concentration of memories, a snapshot almost too smooth and clean to be true. Each image becomes the archetype of a half-forgotten Eden, where one would like to find oneself for a moment. The colours become fanciful and the vegetation takes on a Victorian decorative quality. This exhibition was created in Paris over the last year and obviously echoes my own frustrations and desires to flee my present reality. The various planes and layers of colour, which build upon themselves in each painting, creates a small theatrical set – all that one has to do is to enter the scene.

Hugo Caddous – Paris, March 2021