ART CRITIQUES

 
 

Caroline Canault  - translation Corinne Martin
Her work engulfs humanity with unrestrained and overflowing violence to bear aesthetic witness to a society where the survival of man is sometimes forgotten.
"Out of the indescribable chaos of the canvas something must emerge. »
She most often uses acrylic and tiny foreign bodies such as debris that she assembles and glues together as starting materials to tie her characters to the painting.
 
Her unbridled, burning, vindictive gesture skims the human trace of a body and a spirit in survival mode. In her painting, we do not find vanishing lines or perspectives, but confrontation and superimposition. The lines are noticeable scars, revealing  the only visible areas of indecision and renunciation. Pierrette Cornu erases and fragments.
"Nothing is forever, definitive or finished. My brush shows real life, that of characters who do not fit the frantic pace of our contemporary society. Imperfect life, rough, banal, fragile, complex and therefore interesting. »

 

 
The artist evokes the displacement of populations fleeing violence, economic or ecological disasters, showing them trying to escape with the predicted outcome. The confinements as well as the start of new perspectives, the flight of bodies, the possibilities of escape and the residues of a decisive moment are arranged on the canvas like a sum of bruised footprints where recurring blood red accentuates her grey- and black-toned palette.
 
The artist gives the body an existential question and reveals the meaning  of its tragic destiny where hope is a perpetual quest.
 "My characters - most of the time impeded, hindered but alive - emerge like Russian dolls. My work is a testimony of humanity through painting. I am interested in depicting the state of this brutal world, torn between hope and despair. »
The imprint of death lurks like a cruel signature. Nightmare creatures both threatening and benevolent reinforce the anxiety. They're wolves, ravens... so many "totems, and small creatures meant to protect from disaster. They are also examples of freedom, of crossing borders. »
Bodies and heads full of greed and curiosity rub shoulders with the other actors in this bestiary. They show time as naturally evil because it constantly echoes the mortality of our existence. The painter gives body to death in order to confront it and to escape from it. In the face of this threat, as frightening as it is fascinating, the subjects are put to a short test. With a need to take charge of their existence.
"We don't talk enough about death in our all-too-clean societies. »
 
In each of Pierrette Cornu's paintings you hear a call, a cry, sometimes reinforced by a few narrative clues, and well-chosen words: "violent wind, optimistic, captain, link, arrived perhaps, fragile, absence, trajectory, embarked, thrown far away, bad bird...".
"The spark is audible, I have an auditory memory, words trigger the imagination. »