Listen to the City Fall. Inks on cardboard, Olivier Catte 2026
“By revisiting compositions created fourteen years earlier in 2026, Catte is not repeating himself. He is putting them to the test. The test of a world where we have all watched, on our screens, cities unravel in real time—seen from the sky, in thermal black and white, in the particular silence of drone videos.
These images now exist in our collective memory, and they have retroactively contaminated an entire formal vocabulary—the aerial view, fragmented geometry, the dislocated urban fabric.
What Catte understood, and what this series “Listen to the City Fall” demonstrates with remarkable economy of means, is that his 2012 compositions were already, unknowingly, images of war.
He hasn’t changed his language. It’s the world that has changed its meaning.
Look at the palette across these works.”
Black on raw beige – the starkness of military cartography.
Ghostly white on natural cardboard – a city fading away.
Deep night blues – surveillance, screens, optical systems.
Aquatic cyan – a city underwater, or under phosphorus bombs.
Each chromatic register produces a different modality of destruction. And in each work, the original texts on the cardboard persist – Made in Germany. Made in Turkey. To the requirements of. Fragile Corner – like so many silent witnesses to our trade flows, our supply chains, to all that globalization displaces and delivers.
What seems to me to define Catté’s singular strength in the landscape of contemporary art is precisely this: a radical coherence that turns against itself to produce new meaning.
Where many artists broaden their subject matter over time, he tightens it, delves into it, to the point where the form becomes unbearable—not through excess, but through precision.
There is one last thing.
In a context saturated with instant and disposable digital images, Catté produces slow works. It takes time to tear down this cardboard. It takes time to look at these surfaces. This resistance to speed is not nostalgic—it is political. It says: this image will not pass in two seconds. It will remain. It has weight.
“Listen to the City Fall.” The title doesn’t say that we look. It says that we hear.
And if we still need to ask ourselves why contemporary art has a reason to exist, perhaps the answer lies in this distinction—between seeing and hearing, between consuming an image and feeling its weight.
Charles Freck 2026