The Work of Isabelle Cornaro

Photo by Isabelle Cornaro

Isabelle Cornaro

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Isabelle Cornaro takes issues of decoration and perspective and explodes them. Consider Paysage avec Poussin et témoins oculaires (Landscape with Poussin and Eyewitnesses, 2008), presented first at the Ferme du Buisson just outside Paris in 2008 and then at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf earlier this year. This installation, loosely based on a painting by Nicolas Poussin, sought to re-create the titular landscape in space through a collection of wooden plinths, Persian carpets, and antique or handcrafted objects that fell into one of two categories: tautology (such as vases with flowers on them, and coffee spoons with coffee bean motifs) and tools of measurement and perception (such as rulers and loupes).

Placing material on plinths, Cornaro arranged the whole ensemble in a series of successive grounds, so that larger objects (vases) occupied the foreground while smaller objects occupied the plinths toward the back of the installation, creating a sense of receding perspective. Telescoped from the macro- to the microcosmic, the viewer could freely ambulate through this private and museological universe of Victorian artifacts.

Cornaro was born in Aurillac, France, in 1974; her surname’s origins are traced to 15th-century northern Italy. After studying for a brief spell at the Royal College of Art in London and dividing her time between London and Paris, she spent a year and a half in Berlin. In 2005 she returned and settled in Paris and participated in the Pavillion — a yearlong residency program run by the Palais de Tokyo — and in 2007-08 was included as one of the core artists in a season-long, evolving group show entitled "220 Jours," hosted by GB Agency and curated by Yoann Gourmel and Elodie Royer. It was around then that Cornaro began to really register locally. Now 35, she has begun working with the gallery Balice Hertling in Paris, which will present a solo project with her at Frieze as well as a solo show at the gallery in December.

Cornaro’s sensibility seems to be of an archaeological and even curatorial persuasion. Her practice is a delicate amalgam of collecting, arranging, and more-traditional artmaking techniques like filmmaking, photography, and drawing. Her tendency to embrace objects and commodities by virtue of some bygone talismanic power, often expressed in a symbol or sign inscribed on the object itself, is as likely to bring to mind the alienated bijoux of Mike Kelley as it is the fetishistic menageries of Carol Bove. Cornaro’s series of photos and vitrine compositions "Savannah Surrounding Bangui, and the River Utubangui" (2003-07) consists of spare compositions of jewelry arranged to depict African landscapes on grounds of unpainted plywood. The landscapes themselves are drawn from family photographs taken by Cornaro’s parents (who lived in Africa for a time), so the objects are made to perform representations of personal memory.

Her more recent series, "Moulages sur le vif (vide-poches)" (Ad hoc molds [empty-pockets], 2009), speaks to what could be called a resuscitative relationship with objects. In these images, items of a flea-market variety, ranging from domestic tools to decorative wares, are grouped on a scanner, shot on colored backgrounds, and printed on a one-to-one scale. When I visited Cornaro’s surprisingly spare 10th arrondissement home-studio (the flea-market spoils were all circulating in works, as it turned out), she mentioned an interest in the scanner’s ability to collapse space and contain multiple points of view. By grouping these objects together within such a flat, democratic perspective, in which meaning depends on their mutual proximity, she renews them with a semiotic, rebus-like force.

Questions of mediation and presentation are a central preoccupation of Cornaro’s work. In 2006 she put together the book Plinths Arrangements (published by the Palais de Tokyo), which features a number of historic images of exhibitions, such as Mel Bochner’s "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art" (1966). But in Cornaro’s presentation of the exhibitions, the art objects have been Photoshopped out of the picture. Inevitably haunted by absence, these images disclose a hidden topography of exhibition making.