John Cornu — Portfolio — Slash Paris

Taking up a theme much favoured by the romantics, John Cornu is interesting by contemporary forms of ruin and blindness and sets out to reformulate its signs according to the codes of an art that is both minimal and conceptual. On the face of it, these two genres are diametrically opposed in every way, one favouring an exaggerated sentimentalism, the omnipresence of the subjective and the elegy of desolation, with the other refusing the excesses of expressionism and laying claim to a certain neutrality.
And yet it is precisely in a continual flux between these antagonistic forces that John Cornu’s work lies. In place of a conception of time as something linear, leading inexorably towards decline, the artist opts for a cyclical approach that reminds us how often history repeats itself in a world suffering from chronic blindness. Despite this, his pieces are not limited to the helpless observation of an obsolete world: the artist opens up the field of what is possible by overcoming, through the poetics of the ruin, the apocalyptic conception of which it carries merely the appearance.

© Christian Alandete, October 2009
Translation : James Curwen

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Sonatine (Mélodie Mortelle)

La fonction oblique

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Astéroïdes