Vincent Corpet Forms of Universe
From June 25th to September 26th, 2021, the Château de Jau, in Cases-de-Pène, not far from Perpignan, is presenting a Vincent Corpet exhibition. This is an opportunity for Philippe Ducat to look back at the abundant work of this artist and to dissect, as if with a scalpel, the various series that form its framework.
Corpet is a conceptual artist, or conceptual painter—even if painting is essentially a conceptual art. He works within the constraints he creates for himself, according to very precise protocols. Everything that follows is built in this spirit, without exception: for example, the series of 278 cartoons painted in 1988, made with the assistance of a chess clock (timed. But let there be no mistake, Corpet is indeed a painter, a painter who has established his formal vocabulary, his colours and a unique, original style, in the sense that no one before him had painted in this way.
It was in the early 1980s that Corpet began to lay the foundations of his visual empire. In 1985 he went to Saint-Étienne, where he had forged friendships with artists from the local École des Beaux-Arts (Denis Laget, Pierre Moignard, Philippe Favier, Jean-Pierre Giard, Bianca Falsetti, Véronique Giroux, DjamelTatah, Hervé Jamen and others). He produced a hundred or so paintings on cardboard, which were a sort of preamble. The visual vocabulary (genre scenes, crucifixions, battles, still lifes, etc.) was being put in place, as was the colour palette.
From there, two founding principles were born: that of the analogy of forms combined with visual and mental collage, and that of constraint. From smaller painted cartoons than before, representing still lifes composed of everyday objects found around him—mainly in his kitchen—Corpet created the matrices for his next paintings (religious) through a system of combined shape analogy and schematisation. According to Corpet, analogy is an image in a given form
from which another image within that same form is derived by association of ideas. It is the principle of the “maraboutbout de ficelle” word chain applied to the visual universe.
AS IF BY A SCANNER
1988 was a pivotal year in Vincent Corpet’s career. Indeed, it was in this year that his work on nudes began. Fascinated by the famous polyptych of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the Van Eyck brothers during a visit to Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, he noticed that the two nude bodies of Eve and Adam had been distorted by the strict application of perspective. They are seen from a low angle, but one fact intrigued him: their feet are depicted rigorously from the front. Corpet therefore decided to paint the nudes from the front, with their arms dangling, like a Bertillon-style anthropometric description, without any perspective, as if scanned. Still in a conceptual manner, he set up a whole protocol for posing his models—for Corpet was going to work from life, and not from photographs. They pose at eye level for each part of the body. Painted in a naturalistic—verist—manner and without any caricatured dimension as Otto Dix might have done, they would then be surrounded by a solid colour. And they can be viewed from any direction. They were even exhibited as recumbents at the Château de Jau in 1995. Then, in 1989, Corpet painted analogue tondos that could also be seen from any angle, at the discretion of the person who hung them on a picture rail. Corpet’s principle of indeterminacy can be said to be in line with John Cage’s wellknown precept. Corpet employs it above all when he has a motif to create in an analogue painting: when the contours of a certain shape are to determine another, the first that comes to mind is the right one, without regret. The motif is of no importance. For example, the series of portraits entitled Portraits Analogiques [Analogical Portraits], where the individuals represented would themselves create their own analogy by telling the artist what to represent on the canvas, playing the game of the form that suggests another—the artist being only the hand that executes. An analogical mental portrait.
THE UNREPRESENTABLE
In 1991, for family reasons Vincent Corpet had to move to Marseilles for about two years. He used this time away from his Paris studio to illustrate D. A. F. De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Corpet had recently discovered the Glasochrom pencil. This is a very greasy pencil—a bit like wax—which is usually used by photoengravers or photographers to write indications for retouching, cropping, etc. on the film supports. Corpet used it to produce 602 black anxd white drawings, all of which are inscribed in an oculus. A bit like looking through a telescope. In 1976, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, at the beginning of the last part of the film (‘The Fourth Circle’), the Duke looks through a telescope at scenes of various forms of torture—which are admittedly difficult to bear. On the screen the viewer sees a circular vignetting that accentuates the voyeuristic effect, exactly like that of Corpet’s drawings. What is most surprising is that Corpet has never seen Pasolini’s film, but the same formal flashes of lightning strike them. Corpet’s drawings are in a playing-card format on thick coated paper that allowed him to scratch the surface and modulate his blacks, like an engraver. In 1993 Corpet created diptychs that were executed according to the Rorschach principle: the image painted on one side of the diptych was transferred to the other.This determines a form in which the artist can paint a new analogical image, symmetrical to the first, under duress. The analogy is therefore twofold: one shape leads to another, and the outline of the shapes leads to other shapes within the painting.
A sort of spontaneous generation then quietly takes place. Indeed, from this series of previous diptychs, around 1997, Corpet invented series named Enfantillages [Childishness], with imagery reminiscent of silly, caricatured, grotesque stuffed animals. These paintings are particularly colourful, acidulous and lively. Corpet doesn’t skimp on deformations, with great formal inventiveness. Unlike the previous series, the Enfantillages are to be looked at from one point of view only.
GIGANTISM AND PREHISTORY
In 2005 Corpet painted some very large paintings blindly: the Matrices. Blindly, because the floor space of his studio didn’t allow him to unroll a 33-feet long canvas (for the largest ones). So he painted a part, let it dry, then rolled it up, slid the whole thing across the floor, and unrolled a blank part in order to paint it in turn, and so on, until completed. The result is striking because the proximity to the artists of the Chauvet or Lascaux walls is obvious. Corpet has always been fascinated by these frescoes from the origin of the artistic world.This can invariably be detected in his works, resurgences more or less conscious, but unapologetically so. Moreover, analogy and collage are anchored in the conceptual thinking of the Aurignacian painters. A horse next to an auroch and a rhinoceros can only be a collage because, in the steppe, they tend to stand at a distance. On the other hand, representations of female genitalia that fit the shapes indicated by the rock relief are pure analogies—and sometimes they are even stuck on the rump of a horse.
In parallel with these Matrices, Corpet produces paintings baptised Analfabet [Illiterate] in a burlesque style. They are studded with elements of language based on puns in relation to the thing itself: a kind of structure in verbal analogy, without its being clear whether the form determined the puns or the opposite (no doubt both). “I want to make people look at the writing,” says Corpet. This was the first time that Corpet used the colour black in his paintings—the 602 drawings after Sade being graphic, not pictorial. Previously, the darkest hue had been achieved by mixing all the colours on his palette. He also took the experimentation further with scratching and wiping, which he had used in the 602 drawings. From a black surface, the erased parts would reveal an image—a process identical to that of the monotype.
Over a period of about ten years, from 2006 to 2016, Corpet would cut out the large Matrices, staple them to an all-over frame, and reinvent a new image on top. These are the Cellules-Souches [Stem Cells] and the Poils à Gratter [Itching Powders]. Loaded, without a single blank area, everything is painted. The “cave painting” effect is particularly remarkable.
At the same time as these Cellules-Souches, Corpet was going to tackle the great figures of art—especially their works. Historical paintings by old masters redone in black and white, in the original format, and then overlaid with flat areas of colour and/or painted shapes. Like a performer, Corpet was filmed making these paintings by Olivier Taïeb and Laetitia Laguzet, two film-maker friends. (1) Called Fuck Maîtres [Fuck Masters]—a rather unfortunate title for the series, incidentally— these works are fascinating in their power and their high-flying nature, akin to a live performance.
Like Hokusai who, in 1804, painted blind a giant daruma (a figurine for wishing upon in the shape of a culbuto) of more than 240 square metres in the heart of the Edo temple with a broom and a bucket of Indian ink. One had to perch on the roofs to see the whole of his drawing.
Corpet continues the dialogue with the great figures of art in the Dessais [Death/Essays] series, where he plays with black and white details of paintings from the world’s cultural heritage, surrounded by an abstract form, and corrected by redactions and additions. Once again, the humorous, jubilant dimension is always underlying.
PAINTING AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
In recent years Corpet has used Facebook as a conceptual tool of indeterminacy. Using the same process as the Analogical Portraits, he asks visitors to his Facebook account to tell him which colour and which animal suggest a particular politician (Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, RecepTayyip Erdoğan, Silvio Berlusconi, etc.). Based on their answers, he paints an analogue portrait in which several animals and several colours will be arranged. This is the Chimères [Chimeras] series, in the mode of the Proust Questionnaire. In short, Corpet’s art is viral. It is audacity, irreverence, inventiveness, humour and derision, intellectual virtuosity. All this in an infinite range of pictorial possibilities that he has invented for himself, proving that the best way to avoid constraints is to create them—the Oulipians wouldn’t disagree.
1 Film by Laetitia Laguzet: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=5bAFzmKc7zY. Film by Olivier Taïeb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLpjT26MYmE.
Philippe Ducat is a graphic designer who specialises in art books, a publisher and a collector of collections: paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, vinyl recordings, books (art history, coffee table books, literature, antique books, illustrated books, etc.), documents related to art, etc.