2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize: meet the nominees (2/4): Isabelle Cornaro
The Marcel Duchamp Prize was created in 2000 on the initiative of the ADIAF ("Association pour la diffusion internationale de l'art français"), to highlight the creative abundance of the French art scene, and has been supported by Societe Générale Private Banking for several years. Its aim is to distinguish the most representative artists of their generation and to promote internationally the diversity of practices currently at work in France. Meet one of the 2021 nominees, Isabelle Cornaro.
How would you describe your current practice in terms of preferred media and themes?
My work is multi-disciplinary and covers video, painting, sculpture and installations. It draws on representation systems typical of European culture (perspective, landscaped format) to question our history and observe how the past informs the present. This approach that is both sensitive and material — the materials used being chosen for their history as well as their optical and tactile qualities — pays close attention to the notion of viewpoint, the relationship between object and image, original and copy.
Image credits: View of the installation of Isabelle Cornaro for the 2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Centre Pompidou / Photo: Bertrand Prévost
What pieces (or series of pieces) best epitomise your work, or are particularly meaningful to you?
The series Paysages are free adaptations of the classic pastoral theme. It offers a form of landscape — where exhibition vocabulary (picture moulding, column, base, platform) is indexed on the geometry and abstraction of the perspective grid, the schematic reduction of an ideal space — that appeared at the start of European expansionism. Drawing inspiration from the classical painting tradition, Paysages uses the vocabulary of the installation and different registers of exhibition techniques, from the display of merchandise to museology, and from the cabinet of curiosities to the broom closet.
Reproductions — a series of paintings spray-painted either directly on the wall or on canvas — roughly translates existing painting images that are typical of western modernity. The grain of the painting — its texture mineral when on the wall and downy when on canvas — creates tension between the subject of the image and what the image represents, as if unmaking this representation and effecting a shift from sign to pure matter.
This tension is also worked into my 16mm silent films. They depict old and contemporary objects steeped in affect, culture and political history. Ripped from their purpose, these artefacts lose their neutrality: the money and cheap merchandise evoke the unequal exchange on which imperialism is founded, as well as the relationships of seduction, power and exploitation governing the movement of objects in human societies. The plastic, strictly abstract dimension of the pieces likens them to experiments of avant-garde cinema and scientific films, while recalling the fetishism of advertising or genre film.
Image credits: View of the installation of Isabelle Cornaro for the 2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Centre Pompidou / Photo: Bertrand Prévost
Tell us about a source of inspiration that has been important in your journey (an encounter, a lecture, an event, etc.).
I was particularly inspired by the texts of Anne Cauquelin, including L’invention du Paysage, by Serge Daney’s texts on cinema, and by my discovery of Mike Kelley and Sherrie Levine’s work — two artists who deal with the representation and circulation of images.
Can you give us a few words on your project for the 2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize?
It is made up of work that represents the series and formats I've been working on over the past few years. There is a central room out of the Paysages series where the perspective structure will be accompanied by standardised, mostly plastic objects related to mass production and the entertainment industry that will be arranged on stands or on the floor. Placed diagonally and in the middle of the space, the structure will have recent films projected on the wall, in particular an animation entitled Eyesore which shows the transformation of characters into objects. Finally, there will be one or two spray-painted paintings from the Reproductions series. The idea is to have within the space a dynamic ensemble, and expose the systems of translation at work between the different pieces, between the pieces and their efferent, and between the objects and the images.
Image credits: View of the installation of Isabelle Cornaro for the 2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Centre Pompidou / Photo: Bertrand Prévost
Where will you be exhibiting after the Marcel Duchamp Prize?
There is a new monograph being prepared with JRP Editions, and the galleries I work with are organising a few solo exhibitions. A number of commissioned public artworks will also be inaugurated in 2022: in Rennes where I'm part of renovating the interiors and the outside signage of the new extension of the Musée des Beaux-Art; and at the Hôpital Riviera-Chablais, near Montreux in Switzerland, where I designed an immersive installation. I’ll also be taking part in the 2022 Nuit Blanche in Paris in October, and in the 10-year exhibition of the artist’ residencies of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.
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