Isabelle Cornaro works with painting, sculpture, film and installation to explore the influence of history and culture on our perception of reality. Trained as an art historian specializing in 16th century European Mannerism, her visual language draws from a wide range of references from the Baroque to modernist abstraction. Her installation Paysage avec Poussin et témoins oculaires (Landscape with Poussin and Eyewitnesses, 2008), in which she paraphrased the ideal landscapes of the classicist Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and explored the relationship between landscape, painting, and sculpture in a distinctive style with a cleverly balanced mix of cheap materials and valuable collectibles, won wide acclaim. In much of her work, Cornaro uses found objects imbued with symbolic potential or emotional value, which she presents in a variety of representational forms and media to reveal the subtle shifts in meaning brought about by processes of reproduction and translation.

Borrowed from domestic, decorative, or functional contexts, these artifacts are often associated with Western culture as a means of power. Their combination and arrangement in the artist’s work invites the viewer to question the relationships between systems of representation and our understanding of the world. Abstracted and transformed with heightened artifice, the staged compositions perform a status shift from instinctively chosen categories such as precious, sacred, or personal into an unfamiliar space with unnatural excess of surreal colors and strong-hued emulsions. In denaturalizing the relationship to the familiar, these objects are offered to intense observation for contemplation, yet at the same time distanced and stripped of their meaning. However, she is also concerned with painting itself, which she formulates in a distanced and unrepresentative way. In her videos, on the other hand, she often thematizes everyday objects/ to which she gives special attention – also on the part of the viewer – by focusing on them in the film. In doing so, she uses the mechanics of film to question traditional patterns of representation and instead accentuate the materiality of objects or body parts, pushing the degree of detachment and alienation.

Beate Reifenscheid