Lot Essay
Corneille was an adventurous traveller, trekking through Africa, South America, Japan and the Tropics. Here he was captivated by the hot colours and lush landscapes, and these ingredients informed his pictures of the early sixties.
Dans un Jardin Fleuri depicts an imaginary tropical garden, blooming bountifully with rainbow-coloured flaura and forna. Corneille gives us a bird's eye of the landscape, so that the organic forms appear to float and have a biomorphic quality, like cells under a microscope. The CoBrA writer, Christian Dotremont described Corneille's paintings as "inspirational topography, not because of a fixity, but because of a simple and complex movement, as if repeated but always different, curved lines and straight lines, spirals and radiations, perfections and cracks. Paintings [like] a single unfolded surface from which to fly away. To return. To return, but each time to become anew." (In: Ex. Cat. Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Corneille, 1974).
Dans un Jardin Fleuri depicts an imaginary tropical garden, blooming bountifully with rainbow-coloured flaura and forna. Corneille gives us a bird's eye of the landscape, so that the organic forms appear to float and have a biomorphic quality, like cells under a microscope. The CoBrA writer, Christian Dotremont described Corneille's paintings as "inspirational topography, not because of a fixity, but because of a simple and complex movement, as if repeated but always different, curved lines and straight lines, spirals and radiations, perfections and cracks. Paintings [like] a single unfolded surface from which to fly away. To return. To return, but each time to become anew." (In: Ex. Cat. Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Corneille, 1974).