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bis 19.09. | #4356ARTatBerlin | Galerie Gilla Lörcher zeigt ab 16. August 2024 die Ausstellung LETTRES MORTES des Künstlers John Cornu.
Galerie Gilla Loercher presents the 5th solo exhibition of the French artist John Cornu.
John Cornu spent several months in Okinawa as part of a residency scholarship at the Nanjo Art Museum (Japan) in 2022. The results of his stay and research trip will be presented in the exhibition LETTRES MORTES during BERLIN ART WEEK at Galerie Gilla Loercher.galerie
This exhibition 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 generate a variety 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.
For the artist, travelling as a point of departure or escape is the reason for the exhibition. The question of travel, exile, circulation and ecology is a recurring theme in contemporary art; and the artist who travels, wherever he is, is in a continuous dialogue with the objects he uses, takes up or makes, with the situations he observes and with moments he derives from them. As a source of inspiration, influence and exchange, travelling allows the artist to appropriate new geographies, to experience other forms and borders, to widen his gaze while accepting the fragmentary aspect of each experience. Travelling gives the artist a time to live and work. It offers a view of new horizons, real or imaginary, of expanding one’s own relationship to the world and to others, of rethinking one’s own work and experimenting with new materials.
This exhibition entitled ‘Lettres mortes’ is based on a mythological tale that makes the island of Okinawa (Japan) the cradle of humanity and writing. It is the story of a poetic dialogue between a superior power and the first hominids who are said to have come from this region. To speak with these distant ancestors, this power travelled across the sea and deposited the graphemes of an archaic alphabet on the sand in successive waves. Like the bones of a skeleton – that of a dead language – these bleached coral ‘letters’ bring sunken worlds back to life, recalling literatures whose remains hint at sentences from another time, another land.
The works presented in this exhibition, derived from collected elements and images, explore what remains of memory – the sensations, experiences and residual images. The act of collecting is also an archaic gesture that responds to needs, a gesture that finds many echoes or functions in the field of contemporary art. Lettres mortes’ combines travelling in space and time to propose pictorial and sculptural compositions. The works formed from fragments of this ‘primitive alphabet’ are imbued with a certain modernism, but also retain a freedom of execution that allows for anachronisms and technical changes.
John Cornu (born 1976, lives and works in Paris and Renes) works with a heritage of minimalism and modernism (monochromy, seriality, modularity, primacy of materials) while maintaining a relationship with the context (historical, architectural, social) and a form of contemporary romanticism (Dionysianism, erosion, blindness, references to different sonic universes and entropy). With his interest in modern ruins, logics of power and anthropological gaps, the artist imbues his productions with an atmosphere that is both poetic and uncompromising. Whether they are sculptural, performative or installative, they address paradoxical forces and create a multitude of meanings and interpretations.
STILL LIFE II; 2022. Koralle, Gewindestangen, 12 x 40 x 30 cm, photo: John Cornu
John Cornu‘s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions 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 Centre 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).
Opening: Friday, 16. August. 2024, 7 – 9 pm.
exhibition dates: Friday, 16. August – Thursday, 19. September 2024
To the gallery
Title image caption: Galerie Gilla Loercher, John Cornu
Exhibition John cornu – Galerie Gilla Lörcher | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
