On Words is a collection of interviews with leading women artists linked to the contemporary art scene. In conversation with Juilie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter, the artists are invited to trace the origin of their respective practices, discuss the challenges they have encountered, and share how they perceive the world. The sum of the voices brought together in the series On Words, co-edited by the Swiss Institute of Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and Scheideggerand Spiess, creates a polyphonic history of art-told by those playing an active part in its shaping.

Isabelle Cornaro’s works demonstrate how perception is conditioned by culture. Objects, their origins, our emotional connection with them — these are the themes of theatrical installations and short films. In conversation with Julie Enckell, Isabelle Cornaro discusses the sources and evolution of her art.

Text by Sarah Burkhalter, Julie Enckell, Federica Martini and Isabelle Cornaro
Designed by Valeria Bonin and Diego Bontognali
Softback, 50p, illustrated
103mm x 152mm
Scheidegger and Spiess 2023
ISBN 978 3 85881 871 3

On display at LA><ART from January 11 – February 22, 2014, Isabelle Cornaro’s exhibition “This Morbid Roundtrip from Subject to Object” explored the experience of perception in a formal language that bridged photography, drawing, film and sculpture. The exhibition focused on three 16mm shots, each presenting accumulated domestic objects, that distilled the monumental in the miniature and the painterly in the found. As a counterpart to the films, Cornaro exhibited a sculpture from her ongoing “Homonymes” series of slip cast sculptures, which play on how the baroque sought organic principles in decorative motifs. Through film, sculpture, drawing and painting, the French artist re-evaluates objects by exploring the tensions between their aesthetic and cultural value and by questioning meaning through formal and conceptual modes of display. The exhibition calatogue, designed by Lauren Mackler, features images from the films, alongside image-specific commentary by the author. Readers will also gain insight into the inspiration and process behind both “Homonymes” and “This Morbid Round Trip from Subject to Object” in an interview with Isabelle Cornaro by Matthew Schum. 

Text by Lauren Mackler

Interview by Matthew Schum

Designed by Lauren Mackler
116p, illustrated

101mm x 152 mm

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Through film, sculpture, drawing and painting, French artist Isabelle Cornaro re-evaluates objects by exploring the tensions between their aesthetic and cultural value and by questioning meaning through formal and conceptual modes of display.

Cornaro uses scanning, photography and plaster casting as her methods of production. Through meticulous arrangements, she investigates the properties of objects and the historicity they can point to or steer away from. Homonyms (II) (2012), for example, are coloured plaster casts taken from soft materials such as laces, quilts and carpets. The misplaced use of colour and materiality of their new form alters their original identity and disrupts how these transformed objects are perceived. In the film, Money filmed from the side and a three-quarter view (2010), Cornraro portrays actual coins and Euro notes being transformed into abstract forms through the cinematic use of light and colour. The preoccupation with spatiality and light in the film brings currency’s aesthetic into the composition, stripping the importance of its monetary value. Cornaro creates differing landscapes in her work, welcoming new reflections on the ideology of object and space.

Text by Fabrice Stroun and Isabelle Cornaro
Designed by Jonathan Hares
Softback, 64p, illustrated
232mm x 167mm
Edition of 500
White Cube 2012
ISBN 978 1 906072 72 8

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Isabelle Cornaro (b. 1974, France) investigates the relationship between objects—especially decorative objects—value, and art, through the issues of representation, perceptual experience, and reproduction. She is also exploring how to translate forms and languages, for example an old master painting into a 3D installation, a film into a graphic score, or the vocabulary of Minimalism into a more emotional language. She mines ambiguity by setting up a tension between the analytical, symbolic, lyrical, and anecdotal, addressing how our way of looking constructs the world and its uses. She works with various media such as installation, painting, sculpture, video, and drawing. To accompany the first publication on Isabelle Cornaro’s works, this book brings together a comprehensive essay by art historian and critic Vivian Sky Rehberg, an interview with London-based Raven Row deputy director Alice Motard, and an examination of her relationship with decorative arts by Glenn Adamson, Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Published with the Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; the Parc culturel de Rentilly; the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, Troyes; the Fondation d’entreprise Pernold Ricard, Paris; CNAC – Le Magasin, Grenoble; and the Kunsthalle Bern.
French edition (ISBN 978-3-03764- 209-2) only available by les presses du réel.

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