Corneille
1922 - 2010

Corneille settled in Paris in 1950.

Corneille had exhibited in the capital the previous year at the Galerie Colette Allendy, with Appel and Constant, co-founders with himself of the groups Expérimental and Réflexe that preceded the group Cobra, which was joined by Alechinsky, Dotremont and Jorn (1948). At the time, the Galerie Colette Allendy was a meeting place for veterans of the avant-garde as well as for young artists. In 1951 and 1952, for instance, Corneille saw Picabia’s two last exhibitions there. He also met Wols at the gallery, as well as Yves Klein, Atlan, Bryen, Doucet, O. Gauthier and Jacques Audibert. Corneille’s painting already reflected a very personal world. After studying drawing at the Fine Arts Academy in Amsterdam, he had taught himself to paint. On a visit to Budapest in 1947, he observed how nature had been mutilated by the war. The theme of wild organic elements appeared giving birth to the series Jardins, which he showed at Europa Iskola. The work of Paul Klee was a further decisive revelation for him. This approach was soon completed by study of the works of Picasso and Kandinsky, and reading the works of Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Breton and Eluard, who confirmed his intuition that everything is related. From 1948 his journeys to North Africa permitted him to live a carnal relationship with the cosmos: in 1949, in the South of Tunisia, he experienced the revelation of colour, which was to be a constant feature in his work: in 1952, he stayed at Hoggar searching for Antinea, then in the period 1956 to 1957 Central Africa enabled him to acquaint himself with myths, beliefs and rites closely linked to signs. Journeys to South America followed in 1958, and between 1962 and 1966 to Brazil and Cuba, source material which nourished his work and which had no equivalent in the Paris art world of the 1950s. We will not consider here the Corneille of Cobra, rather the Corneille who, without ever renouncing an adventure based on shared ideas, aesthetic commitments and friendship, lived in the shared studio of rue Sauteuil, drawing on an energy and a desire to create which permitted him to discover himself. Over the years he built up a specific thematic vocabulary dominated by primordial forces: the stars, the clouds, the sea, the construction of the earth. For instance the circular form, head or sun – source of light, of life, cloud and sap, which increases and generates movement. An explosion of forms gives birth to a network of tangled lines suggesting a labyrinth, the universe after chaos, after the golden age in which man faces conflicts, described by Jean-Clarence Lambert as “nature, [where] landscape is no longer this maternal breast on which man finds happiness, the ease of paradise. It is the great silence which only answers the voice that questions it by an echo” (Corneille, Musée de Poche). Ordered or chaotic, it is a landscape that Corneille always attempts to tame: the surroundings of the city, the country landscapes of the 1950s, animated by little imaginary grotesque figures from the 1970s; lunar and mineral desert landscapes from 1952, with fossils, stones and white rocks which arrange themselves around an elementary organic structure: the cell. Multiplied in concentric circles, it emphasised the strength of the whole (La forêt des pierres), constituting another leitmotiv. Another constant feature, and a memory of Hoggar, were minerals filled with seed, recording the artist’s wish for order, confirmed by a visit to Spain in 1953, with a stay in Majorca, to which he returned in 1961, the year in which he began painting with his canvases laid out on the ground. Between 1962 and 1966 he spent his summers at Cadaquès and made a series of gouaches: these were shown in solo exhibitions in 1962, at the Galerie Mathias Fels in Paris, with texts by Hubert Juin, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Jean-Jacques Lévêque and Lasse Söderberg, and in 1964 at the same gallery. We should note the constant duality present in Corneille’s work in the 1960s, with a search for rigorous, disciplined construction, counterbalanced by spontaneity, wild forms and colours plunging into plant anarchy provoked by the action of rains and an abundance of fertile seeds. The colour in his work takes on an exhilarating quality. The titles of the canvases — themselves little poems — give us an indication as to his inspiration, always related to a specific vision that he finds moving. Through the texture, we witness a metamorphosis of everything round about: “An overall view of Corneille’s work reveals it as a continuous Dionysiac ode to the luxuriance of nature… Everything here is chaos in movement, but the elements of this chaos nonetheless combine in a cosmic relationship. The artist paints a changing world in which things have not yet become objects” (F.T. Gribling, Corneille et l’opulente monotonie, Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1972. Coll. Art et Architecture aux Pays-Bas).