Interview04.04.2025

King Kasaï / Minerais de sang, entretien avec Christophe Boltanski

April 2025

Essay01.07.2020

On Edward Kienholz’s installation Roxy’s

Isabelle Cornaro for Pavilionesque, Number III, July 2020

Review22.07.2021

Entre fétichisme et publicité, l’artiste Isabelle Cornaro détourne les obsessions de notre époque

Alexandre Parodi, Numéro, July 2021

Essay15.03.2024

Isabelle Cornaro, Mother Laws Matter

Jeanne Graff, March 2024

Essay01.02.2024

Isabelle Cornaro: Looking at Things

Kirsty Bell, February 2024

Review06.06.2024

Una vanitas contemporanea. La mostra di Isabelle Cornaro a Roma

Pericle Guaglianone, Artribune, June 2024

Essay01.12.2014

L’artiste en traducteur

Farah Khelil, Thèse de doctorat Arts et Sciences de l’Art, December 2014

Essay01.10.2021

Seeing, Understanding, Living

Clément Dirié, Marcel Duchamp Prize 2021, October 2021

Interview01.03.2019

Isabelle Cornaro

with Nicolas Trembley and Thibaut Wychowanok, Numéro, March 2019

Review17.10.2018

Blue Spill – Isabelle Cornaro

Paul Ardenne, Artpress, October 2018

Review24.10.2018

Isabelle Cornaro at Balice Hertling

Mara Hoberman, Artforum International, October 2018

Essay11.01.2014

In Captions, As Annotations

Lauren Mackler, This Morbid Round Trip from Subject to Object (a facsimile), Ed. LAXART, 2014

Interview11.01.2014

Isabelle Cornaro Interview

with Matthew Schum, This Morbid Round Trip from Subject to Object (a facsimile), Ed. LAXART, 2014

Essay01.06.2011

Repointing: Isabelle Cornaro and the Index

Glenn Adamson, Isabelle Cornaro, Ed. JRP|Ringier, 2011

Interview01.01.2011

From the Cinematic to Display

with Alice Motard, Isabelle Cornaro, Ed. JRP|Ringier, 2011

Essay01.06.2011

Artist in the Act

Clément Dirié, Isabelle Cornaro, Ed. JRP|Ringier, 2011

Essay01.06.2011

Vanishing Points and Emerging Forms

Vivian Sky Rehberg, Isabelle Cornaro, Ed. JRP|Ringier, 2011

Interview01.07.2012

Isabelle Cornaro in conversation with Fabrice Stroun

with Fabrice Stroun, Isabelle Cornaro, Ed. Inside the White Cube, 2012

Essay01.01.2016

Isabelle Cornaro

Benjamin Thorel, Le Journal de la Verrière, January 2016

Interview08.02.2016

Deconstructing Classicism

with Emily McDermott, Interview, August 2016

Essay01.02.2015

Suspended Animation

Paul Galvez, Artforum, February 2015

Review01.03.2015

Isabelle Cornaro at Galerie Francesca Pia

Aoife Rosenmeyer, Frieze, March 2015

Review24.05.2015

Isabelle Cornaro at South London Gallery

Andrew Witt, Artforum.com, May 2015

Review05.05.2015

Le impressioni chromatiche di Isabelle Cornaro

Elena Bordignon, ATP Diary, May 2015

Review01.05.2014

Isabelle Cornaro at LAXART

Eli Diner, Artforum, May 2014

Review01.02.2016

Isabelle Cornaro at Balice Hertling

Riccardo Venturi, Artforum, February 2016

Review27.01.2016

Des gestes de la pensée

Alain Berland, Mouvement.net, January 2016

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Essay / 01.02.2024

Isabelle Cornaro: Looking at Things Kirsty Bell, February 2024

Essay / 01.02.2024

Isabelle Cornaro: Looking at Things

Kirsty Bell, February 2024

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