“Cadastres Exquis” is an emotional mapping of San Francisco — a city of drifting memories, fog, and fleeting sensations. The title merges cadastre (land mapping) with exquisite corpse (surrealist play), forming a poetic method of urban automatic writing.
Through layered painting, text, and printed elements, Sylvain Doreau traces a shifting cityscape where emotion overrides form. Words dissolve and reappear, becoming part of a spontaneous “emotional cartography.”
This series invites viewers into a dreamlike meditation on memory, light, and impermanence — where the city becomes a canvas of lived feeling.

Through this series, Sylvain Doreau combines painting, text, digital layering, and expands it to Digigal through AI. It evokes a shifting cityscape where personal impressions take precedence over fixed form. Fragments of printed city maps — transferred onto Japanese or Khadi paper — are painted over, torn, and embedded into the composition. These remnants of physical maps become the foundation of the work: partially vanished, buried beneath layers of pigment and words. What remains is revealed in flashes — chromatic punctuation that hints at a hidden structure beneath the surface.