There is a beguiling simplicity to Isabelle Cornaro’s early work, Savane autour de Bangui et le fleuve Utubangui (2003-2009), a series of twelve colour photographs that address the past through its physical remnants. In each image, a schematic landscape is drawn by placing various pieces of jewelry on a plywood board and photographing the results. A fine gold chain sketches the path of a river while two watches laid on their sides suggest jagged mountain ridges. Or two chains and a gold watch are stretched out flat to represent land, sea and sky, while a golden bangle is a low-hanging sun. The same items are reconfigured every time in provisional arrangements, suggesting different moments or perspectives.
Through this childlike task of rearranging, a simultaneity is conjured whereby the earrings, bracelets or watches remain obstinately themselves, while nevertheless summoning the idea of a landscape. They do not resolve, but slip continually between narrative and formal modes, evocation and facticity, figuration and a conceptual approach. Each image seems to approach the dilemma anew, as if memory were a puzzle to be solved and rendered unambiguous. I should mention at this point that the artist spent her childhood living in the savanna of the Central African Republic, where her father was a doctor. Here an emotive question is being handled with a coolly unsentimental eye.
These deceptively simple works operate as a kind of prototype and establish Cornaro’s enduring areas of interest: the interplay of object and image between two and three dimensions; the elasticity of scale and the role of perception in constructing meaning; the relation of real to replica; and the functions of pictorial landscape traditions. In a series of works called Paysages which she began in 2008, the depth of field implied by the jewelry photographs is extrapolated. Here various plinths and objects of different scales are arranged within an exhibition space to approximate the single-point perspective found in many historical landscape paintings. The viewer is enlisted to assemble the unifying visual logic by moving through the room. In this and other series, such as the Homonymes (2010 on) – in which collected items are cast in a single block of uniform colour and material – things are laid out like evidence in a radical flattening of register. What are we looking at, these works demand? What is the nature of material, mass, surface, colour, form, use, or value? All is subject to a forensic attention that denies simple answers and instead uncovers several simultaneous layers of interpretation.
When is landscape simply background – a constellation of geologies, waterways, fields and forests – and when is it rather a structuring context that determines our place in the world? “Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” writes Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory.”[1] But landscape is not only memory and not only cultural, it is also social, political and economic. Cornaro’s analytical conceptions resist romantic notions to focus on landscape’s stylized portrayal and cultural signification, but also hint at other aspects. Beneath the undulating hills and rivers of the savanna, many kinds of precious minerals were ruthlessly extracted and sold. The local population provided the hard labour, while the profits were pocketed by Western powers. The minerals were processed into standardized products for commercial use, such as the mass-produced jewelry designed for middle-class western markets that appear on Cornaro’s pictures.
Another more personal dimension is lodged in Cornaro’s playful Savane scenes, as the jewelry they picture belonged to her mother who died when the artist was young. The images attempt to recreate snapshots of her mother wearing them in these settings. The pieces of jewelry constitute an inventory: intransigent evidence of a person fixed in a cross-section of time and place and preserved by memory. Their compulsive rearrangement is like a ritual to summon the past and access a context not understood or even perceived at the time. Like landscape itself, family history is not just background, but also the constituting structure of a person’s life.
Almost twenty years after making the initial series, Cornaro returned to the subject in 2022 in a new body of work which forgoes the transferal of object to photograph and displays the things themselves, albeit replicas of the original jewelry pieces. These were 3D-scanned and enlarged, doubled or quadrupled in scale, into clumsy versions in polished bronze. Whereas a microscopic view can reveal the structure beneath appearance, in this act of reproduction the objects are larger but remain opaque. The boards on which they are arranged offer more information, however, being identified as “okumé plywood”: a fast-growing hardwood found in Gabon which by law may not be exported in log form, but only as locally-made veneer, therefore benefitting Gabon’s economy. Some progress has been made since the exploitations of the 1970s when Cornaro was a child in the Central African Republic.
Transfers of scale and a granular zooming-in occur in many of Cornaro’s sculptures, images and films: in the grain of 16mm, the mineral pigment applied to the surface of objects, or the low compression spray used to make pictures which remain distractingly out of reach, eyes unable to focus on the little dots of paint. Depth of field is questioned and surfaces are troubled, either by coating all manner of unrelated items in a single saturating colour, by consuming them in film, or by employing obvious fakes like rubber snakes or ghoulish body parts. The stuff that appears in Cornaro’s work is stubbornly irreducible; it seems to shimmer in a haze of nondisclosure which belies its ordinary appearance. Meaning emerges elsewhere, through contingency and interconnection, subject to the qualifying terms of perception, and seems to find its expression through limitation, where limitation itself is also the point.
[1] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory pp.6-7.
Text commissioned by ADAGP to the occasion of the exhibition Mother, Laws, Matter, at Fondazione Giuliani, March 2024