Isabelle Cornaro
14.10.2022 - 15.01.2023
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

 

Eyesore

Isabelle Cornaro (1974, France) uses a range of media including drawing, photography, video and installation. Her works often reference animated films, iconic landscape design and exhibition views, sourced from historical and cultural archives. Her practice counter-intuitively employs a conceptual approach to investigate the ways in which objects and artworks are propped up, animated and fetishized. She works with familiar objects specifically selected for their sentimental or symbolic value, as a means of triggering a semiotic reading of these objects as opposed to an affected sense of recognition.

In the animated film Eyesore (2019) which entered the Frac Bretagne collection in 2022, her work on the plasticity of forms focuses on typical social places, whether urban, intimate or private, crossed by violent, enigmatic phenomena. Short sequences, like so many snippets of unresolved plots, depict abrupt state changes from animate to inanimate – including characters metamorphosing into objects. Some scenes evoke current events, others the twilight atmospheres of a science-fiction story, between synesthesia and melancholy. In this film, Isabelle Cornaro develops metaphors for unbridled consumption that are as humorous as they are horrific, showing human bodies evolving into useless commodities and meaningless monuments, ultimately ending in a ruined world.

Digital film
Duration: 2’30 ”
Animation and drawing : Victorin Ripert
Purchased from the Balice Hertling Gallery in 2022
Produced with the support of the Fondation des artistes


Visuel : Isabelle cornaro, Eyesore, 2019 (capture – detail), Frac Bretagne collection © Isabelle Cornaro / ADAGP, Paris 2022