John Cornu | LETTRES MORTES

Galerie Gilla Loercher is very pleased to present the 5th solo show by French artist John Cornu.
The opening will be on 16 August 2024 from 19:00-21:00.

The exhibition LETTRES MORTES follows on from an initial series of works created during the artist's residency in 2022, which led to a solo exhibition at the Nanjo Art Museum in Okinawa. Since then, the coral fragments that cover the island's beaches have piqued John Cornu's interest because they can give rise to a multitude of poetic narratives and ecological prophecies, but also because their natural forms seem to reference sculptures by 20th century masters such as Louise Bourgeois, Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi.

John Cornu (born in 1976, lives and works in Paris and Rennes) works with an aesthetic inherited from Minimalism and Modernism (monochromy, seriality, modularity, the primacy of the materials), while maintaining a strong relation to (historical, architectural, societal) context and a form of contemporary Romanticism (Dionysianism, erosion, blindness, references to different sonic universes, and entropy). With an interest for modern ruins, logics of power, and anthropological gaps, the artist imbues his productions with an atmosphere at once poetic, cathartic and without compromise. Whether sculptural, performative, or installation-based, they address paradoxical forces, setting up a multiplicity of meanings and readings.

John Cornu's work has been shown in numerous solo and group shows at: Institut Giacometti (Paris, FR), Palais de Tokyo and Maison rouge (Paris, FR), Mains d’œuvres (Saint-Ouen, FR), CNEAI (Chatou, Paris, FR), Galerie Edouard-Manet (Gennevilliers, FR), 40mcube/Hub Hug (Rennes, FR), Frac Bretagne (Rennes, FR), Parvis Centre d’art contemporain (Ibos, FR), Bel ordinaire (Pau, FR), CACN-Centre d’art contemporain (Nîmes, FR), Les Trinitaires (Metz, FR), Les Ateliers des Arques (Arques, FR), Fonds Carta (Marseille, FR), BF15 (Lyon, FR), EAC–Espace de l’Art Concret (Mouans-Sartoux, FR), BBB centre d’art et Abattoirs–Frac Midi-Pyrénées and CIAM-La Fabrique (Toulouse, FR), La Galerie Duchamp – Centre d’art contemporain (Yvetot, FR), Prieuré de Pont-Loup (Moret-sur-Loing, FR), Musée des Beaux-arts in Rennes and in Calais (FR), Lyon Biennale (FR), Saint-Paul de Vence Biennale (FR); Attic (Brussels, BE), Académie royale des Beaux-Arts (Brussels, BE), DBKAproject (Brussels, BE), Les Brasseurs (Liège, BE), Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts (Norwich, UK), CIRCA (Montréal, CA), MACRO–Museo di Arte contemporanea di Roma (Rome, IT), Chambre Blanche (Québec, CA), ZQM (Berlin, Germany), the Nuit Blanche in Montreal (CA), Nanjo Art Museum (Okinawa, JP), Maison Arawaka (Takayama, JP) and Galerie Gilla Loercher (Berlin, Germany).


Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin wrote a text about the exhibition LETTRES MORTES by John Cornu:
"Point of departure or escape, travel gives rise to the works here. Borders, flows, migrations, mass tourism... The question of travel, circulation and ecology is a recurrent theme in contemporary art. And the artist who is travelling, wherever he may be, maintains an uninterrupted dialogue with the objects he needs and those he produces, the situations he witnesses and those he creates. A source of inspiration, influence and exchange, travel enables the artist to appropriate new geographies, to experience other forms and limits, to broaden their gaze while accepting the lacunar aspect of every experience. A vector of decentering and a factor in transfiguring the banal, travel offers the artist a poetic time to live and work. It offers a glimpse of new horizons, real or imaginary, of changing their modus operandi, and experimenting with new materials, media and techniques.

Combining spatial and temporal journeys, the exhibition aims to implement what was brought back in the suitcases, items collected far away, what remains in memory, all those images, sensations, experiences and afterimages, because leaving is also and already returning. All these captures, these “gleanings”, which can be seen as forms of predation, are also archaic gestures responding to symbolic needs, gestures that find many echoes or uses in the field of contemporary art.
The fragments of dead coral spotted on the beaches of Okinawa (Japan) seem capable of generating poetic pareidolia and refer to forms that are already referenced or assignable: codes, graphemes belonging to a primitive script, to a language that would be dead today, but also emblematic sculptures from the History of art (Louise Bourgeois, Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Isamu Noguchi, …).

Starting with coral gleaned from days spent in residence on the island , John Cornu presents a body of work combining presentation and representation, fragility and irreverent “expressionism”, organic and geometric.
Fractal, the exhibition reads like a logbook bringing together different scales of presentation. Microscenarios of exhibitions come to life alongside paintings–which also refer to a whole History of painting–, large notebook pages, forming as much the grids of a Go game as the columns of a soroban , shōjis opening onto seaside landscapes, cages, parks, crates to better order and tidy up what was once alive. With each occurrence, and through a play of stratifications and staging, collected and painted forms reveal themselves, respond to each other, arrange and organize themselves, just as much as they wear out.

Veritable memento mori, the works presented also question the notion of fetish, the human/non-human relationship, and the figure of the artist as "catalyst" of a world that is unravelling as it globalizes.
Placed under the angle of poetic sedimentation, desire and a certain exoticism, the exhibition seeks to deploy an intuitive trajectory, favored by these long-distance travels."