FROM DRAWING TO PAINTING
In what follows, I do not want to deal with the Thierry De Cordier who,
in 1985, made his entry in the world as a performer on the steps of the
Museum in Ghent, and did repeat that performance in his meanwhile famous
'Speech to the World' (1985). Neither with the Thierry De Cordier of the
mountain refuges, the tents, the 'chantoirs', the observation posts, let
alone 'The Chapel of Nothingness' in Duffel (2007). Neither with the
Thierry De Cordier who, in the vein of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys,
intended to turn his life into an 'artwork'. Neither with the Thierry De
Cordier who only dares to make drawings when a lot of text is scribbled
around them like with Da Vinci, Duchamp of Panamarenko. Neither with the
Thierry De Cordier who only dares to paint a seascape when he can do so
under the cloak of Kazimir Malevich or Robert Ryman. Even less with the
Thierry De Cordier who, as a 'Sunday philosopher', understands all his
actionsin terms of the meanwhile somewhat outdated Lacanian 'code à la
mode'. Already more with the Thierry De Cordier of some 'surrealistic'
objects. And - although the drawn versions are mostly more interesting -
even more with the Thierry De Cordier of dolls like the 'Pain Catcher'
('Attrape-Souffrance') in Puycelsi (1988).
Not with the man, hence, that cannot say of himself that 'he has
absolutely nothing to do with the twentieth century’.
Whom I rather want to deal with, is the Thierry De Cordier who was
already announced in the drawings that were only meant as sketches for
all these installations, objects and dolls, who timidly came to the
forefront in summary pen drawings on the sheets of a notebook (Drawings
1983-1999, SMAK Ghent), and who now finally proceeded to just paint
paintings, even when I do not immediately think of what we got to see
in Beaubourg 2004 ('Un homme, une maison et un paysage'), as rather of
the impressive - say: masterly - series of landscapes ''Four
Greeneries' that were on view in the
Gallery Hufkens in Brussels (2009).
OMBRA MAI FU CARA.
shade never there was so dear...
Not that there is so much to be said about these paintings: it suffices
to look at them. It is just what it should be: paint on a canvas that
conjures up an entire world. And what a world!
Not precisely a comfortable place to dwell: no trace of human beings.
Uninhabited not so much, as rather uninhabitable, inhospitable. In 'The
Sea', dark, gloomy waves extend to the horizon, in 'Why not rather paint
a seascape?', we look down on a mountain slope, from which an
impenetrable cloud descends over a valley. An oppressive world, where we
threaten to suffocate as in the confines of a womb. No other way to
escape than by trying to return to the very place from where we were
dropped in this world. Wherefore, in 'This isn't yet a seascape',the
gaze forward on the polder landscape is condensed with the gaze backward
on the gate between the legs of a woman, that nevertheless remains
barred irrevocably - sealed with a cross. Views on a world, hence, that
is in every respect the negation of the perspective that unfolds before
the eyes of those who leave the daily paths below to drink from the vast
view on far horizons - if not on inhabited heavens.
The figure of the negation of the vast by the confining seems to be
endemic in these landscapes. We penetrate the canvasses from the lower
halves, which lead us into unfathomable depths. When our gaze lifts to
the horizon, however, it is as if space is contracting: the skies seem
impenetrable (The Sea), seem to descend upon us alongside the mountain
slope (Why not rather paint a seascape?), if not to turn into a
protruding canvas (This isn't yet a seascape). There are more shifts in
perspective. The view on the seascape in 'The Sea' is not precisely
wide, until our gaze is sucked into the hollow of the waves and we
suddenly get the impression of looking from the heights upon a
mountainside below. Also in 'This isn't yet a seascape', we first look
from a modest distance on a kind of polder landscape, wherein we soon
read a bush as pubic hair, so that our gaze glides between the legs,
where we suddenly look down from the heights upon a valley where a river
flows from a split in the rocks, that reminds of the entrance to Dante's
inferno. In 'Why not rather paint a seascape?', it is the dense deck of
clouds that hides from view the mountainside in front of us and the
valley below us, upon which we wanted to look down from the heights. And
these many shifts in perspective go hand in hand with shifts in subject
matter: transformation of seascape into landscape in 'The Sea',
transformation of polder landscape in mountainscape - and 'motherscape'
- in 'This isn't yet a seascape', and transformation from a sight on the
mountainside into a sight on the clouds in 'Why nor rather paint a
seascape?' .
These continuing shifts - this continuous ascending and descending -
correspond to continued vain attempts at getting access to the sublime -
in German more revealingly called 'Das 'Erhabene'. The sublime announces
itself already in the ever renewed attempts at taking a broader
perspective from the heights, attempts that are frustrated time and
again, so that we end up in the dimensionless disconsolateness of an
oppressing jail or womb. That is why these paintings seem to be rather
the precinct to what used to appear in fully sublime landscapes:
although they do no succeed in revealing the sublime as such, they
nevertheless conjure up the memory of it, and therewith the reminiscence
of the destiny of man who contemplates it - just remind of the fact that
Kant, in the face of the starry sky, did not so much feel insignificant,
as rather a free moral being. With Thierry De Cordier, this is not so
evident. One of his early drawings on the sheets of a notebook,
represents an earthworm wallowing in the mud seen from a frog's
perspective (Self-portrait as an earthworm, 1983-1985). In the present
monumental paintings, on the other hand, the artist attempts at
elevating himself as high as possible above the earth, although he
bereaves himself of the sight in the distance there - the beyond behind
the horizon and above the clouds. That is why the fathomless black in
these works is no longer the black of desperateness. Together with that
shimmering white, it rather testifies to the silent mourning - if not to
the repressed guilt - of not being able to match the sublime and
therefore not being prepared to look it in the face. Precisely because
such mourning comes down to recognising the existence of what is lost,
does there emanate a sense of devotion from these paintings, that you
will search in vain in De Cordier's preceding oeuvre...
The curbed attempts to raise above the earth's crust find their echo in
the relentless balancing back and forth on the border between matter and
appearance, between paint on canvas and representation. To be sure, to
bereave the paint from its mimetic dimension, you have to come very
close to the canvas, just like with the old masters. And, equally like
with the old masters, you cannot but be surprised once again by the fact
that some summary brushstrokes can so convincingly conjure up the
illusion of a world. But, with De Cordier, the paint continues to impose
itself even from a distance: suffices it to refer to the broad
brushstroke that penetrates 'The Sea' from the left. The painter does
not stop reminding us of the fact that we are dealing with paint on
canvas: in 'Why not rather paint a seascape?' by leaving the foreground
unfinished, and in 'This isn't yet a seascape', by adding a kind of
painted cord tended horizontally between the edges of the painting. Let
us refer, finally, to the parts that function like a kind of curtain on
the left side of the paintings - the good old 'repoussoir': the bushes
on 'This isn't yet a seascape' and 'Why not rather paint a seascape',
and the wave from the left in 'The Sea'. It is as if the painter arms
himself against the magic of illusion - mimesis - the spell of which he
cannot resist: a far cry from the countless performances, installations,
objects and dolls...
OMBRA DI VEGETABILE..
It is just what it should be, we wrote. But, unfortunately: not fully.
Not so much because the sublime only shimmers through. Precisely such
being merely a shadow speaks, and only adds to the truth of these works.
Rather do we have to deal with the many traces of the twentieth century
nevertheless, despite De Cordier's emphatic 'I have absolutely nothing
to do with the twentieth century’.
To begin with, there was that second room in the Gallery Hufkens, were
no other paintings were to be seen , but rather a paint smeared CD
player from De Cordier's studio: the paintings as a part of a more
comprehensive, veritable installation, hence. Granted, the music that
resounded from the loudspeakers embodied the very sublime of which the
paintings only remind, or to which the text on them only refers (the
aria 'Umbra mai fu' from Händel on 'This isn't yet a seascape').
Next, when entering the room, we get to read a text that questions 'what
language can say about paintings that are silent'. It comes as a
surprise, then, that there is much to be read on these silent paintings.
Although that does not bother me too much here. For, otherwise than the
paintings of Luc Tuymans, which stay or fall with the accompanying text,
the paintings of De Cordier can do without. That is not to say that the
texts can as well be removed from the paintings: the body of the text is
an integral part of the image, and the content resonates with what is to
be seen in the image - think only of quotations like 'Umbra mai fu', or
'Alles drängt sich zur Landschaft' from Philipp Otto Runge, and the
quotation about the unfinished and unfinishable from Joos de Mompere. By
the way: the reference to Händel and Joos de Mompere learns us that it
is not the paintings that - according to a popular adage from Lacan -
gaze at us, like De Cordier contends in that same introductory text. If
there is another gaze at all besides ours, then it is the rather
Sartrean gaze of the masters looking over our shoulders - not to mention
the gaze of Moses behind the clouds on the mountain...
More annoying is that De Cordier and his commentators explain the
already mentioned condensation of landscape and female body, and of
seascape and landscape, in terms of a metonymic series mer/mère/terre
(sea/mother/earth). That is sheer mystification. After all, French is
not the primeval language, whereas the link between landscape and womb
dates back at least to Lascaux, and has in addition explicitly been
thematised in many a landscape by Da Vinci, Rubens and Caspar David
Friedrich. There is no need of resorting to a metonymic series to
explain the relation between landscape and womb; that is only necessary
to explain a 'surrealistic' relation, like that - so cherished by De
Cordier - between father and pear (père/poire, which, in his
West-Flemish dialect, comes down to blunt identity). At the same time,
we suddenly realise how much De Cordier has outgrown the obligatory
flirtation with Magritte in his new works - from Breton's 'rapprochement
fortuit de deux termes' to the good old 'symbol', so to speak. The
rather clumsy attempts at condensing landscape and vagina (for instance
in 'Paysage en forme de poire') are in that sense a turning point.
Flatly embarrassing, on the other hand, is the choice of the title of
the exhibition 'Greeneries' ('Verdures', I suppose after the
West-Flemish 'Groensel'), and of the titles of the paintings in the
catalogue: 'Spinache', 'Pre-soup ', 'Grand Soup', 'The Sea (Finally)'.
That denigratory tone - coming from the peintre-cuisinier and the
peintre-jardinier in De Cordier - makes us think again of Luc Tuymans,
again with the difference, however, that De Cordier is not out at
glossing over his shortcomings, but rather at belittling his mastery
Those 'greeneries' threaten even to spoil the reference to Händel. The
full text to his wonderful aria* sounds: 'Ombra mai fu di vegetabile,/
cara ed amabile, soave piu.' (Shade never there was of a plant, dear and
agreeable, more sweet.) Until we realise that, in that verse, he may
merely have found a suitable occasion to ironically arm himself against
this overwhelming music and his own art. After all, the exhibition also
has another, more appropriate title: 'If painting be the food of
sorrow'... A similar ambivalence speaks from the quotation of Philipp
Otto Runge 'Es drängt sich alles zur Landschaft'. Removed from its
original context, this sentence contains a deeper truth about the image,
and is a such the complete reversal of Magritte's: 'Ceci n'est pas une
pipe', whose rather futile slogan is paraphrased in the title of objects
like 'Ceci n'est pas une cafétière' (1986), and still resounds in the
subtitles of his paintings: 'This isn´t yet a seascape' and 'Could be a
seascape'.
In the light of the above, it will, finally, be clear that it is a sheer
wish-fulfilment - or rather: a genuine Freudian slip - when De Cordier,
in his introductory text, contends that his works tend to the sublime.
In De Cordier's 'Sunday philosophy', life is emerging from the primeval
soup to end up in humans, who only stand up to stare in the Big Void.
Needless to remind that such void is worlds apart from the sublime. To
get the latter in view, it suffices to become somewhat more
short-sighted, and to realise that man has something better to do before
dying than to wallow in the mud with a vacant gaze. It is apparent,
then, that De Cordier's new landscapes testify to something totally
different from the un-sublime feeling of 'in the end, we all are mere
earthworms' - just think of
Jan Fabre's earthworm. Gradually, their
creator transcends the wallowing in the mud of the above mentioned
'Self-portrait as earthworm', from whose perspective the world cannot
but be a claustrophobic void. It is precisely from such imminent
shortening of the perspective that the recent landscapes derive their
unalienable charm....
ON ROMANTICS AND WIERTZ
Suppose you are a vegetable
(Thierry De Cordier, 1986)
De Cordier is wrong, hence, when he contends that he has nothing to do
with the twentieth century - he seems rather to have sold his soul to
that devil. Initially, his desire to paint landscapes could only be
gratified under the guise of minimalism or conceptualism - just think of
the 'After (!) - landscape' that was on display in Kassel 1992, or, more
recently, of the 'Dark Windows' ((2002) or the 'Last (!) landscape'
(2004) wich refers to Kazimir Malevich. Only in 'Why not rather paint a
seascape?' does he come up with old masters like Joos de Mompere and
Philipp Otto Runge. His commentators, however, obstinately continue to
refer to the twentieth century - to figures like Rothko andBarnett
Newman (think of Beyart-Geslin). Perhaps, it is due to such lip service
that, next to the three masterpieces analysed above, there was also a
fourth painting on display in the Gallery Hufkens, that has nothing to
do with the others, nor from the point of view of the image, nor from
the point of view of excellence, although it is firmly integrated is the
series as a third 'conceptual' phase after 'Pre-Soup': 'Grand Soup'....
And, not otherwise than De Cordier himself do all those go wrong who
prefer to consider him as a romantic belonging in the nineteenth
century. Already from his 'Speech to the world' onwards - intended to be
held on a mountain and hence a 'Sermon on the Mount' - as well as from
his 'Attrape Souffrance' (Pain catcher), De Cordier identifies himself
not so much with vegetables, as rather with Jesus Christ himself. He
painted the suffering Christ in 'Crucifix no more' (1999), and, as
already mentioned, also the entrance to the womb in 'This isn't yet a
seascape' is sealed by a cross - and that is where the resurrected
Christ happened to die. Jesus Christ is not precisely a romantic, let
alone a sh.tting earthworm. Even less is he an invention of the
nineteenth century: for by now more than two millennia, he continues to
govern over Western psychology, especially that of the twentieth century
(albeit mostly incognito there), and he will no doubt continue to do so
for centuries more. Besides, the sublime is (already since Longinus)
after all only the secular form of the former Divine. But does not
oblige less therefore...
That makes us surmise that also the referral to the nineteenth century
is merely an alibi. Just as the reference to the romantic only has to
conceal the figure of the suffering but resurrected Christ - or to put
it in profane terms: human beings that feel called to another destiny
than dragging each other and themselves in the mud - just so does the
referral to the nineteenth century only serve the purpose of
circumventing the great masters by substituting them with lesser masters
of the 'academic century' - the century of figures like Wiertz in the
film 'C'est moi que je peins' from Jef Cornelis and Bart Verschaffel.
Also the reference to Philipp Otto Runge - the weaker brother of Caspar
David Friedrich, not to mention other giants of painting in the
nineteenth century, like Turner, who also are breathing in our neck -
speaks volumes in that context.
POPE OR JESUS
In his lesser moments, Jesus recommended to give Caesar what is
Caesar's. Let us hope that Thierry De Cordier can stop being his own
jester rather than simply becoming a sovereign god on his own canvas.
The waiting is for the mountainscapes that are promised to us as the
next in the series...
© Stefan Beyst, May 2009.
CONSULTED TEXTS:
BEYART-GESLIN, Anne: '
Paysage et catégories topologiques : de Cordier et
Rothko'
DE CORDIER, Thierry: 'Mes Ecrits de Cuisine', Hayen , Brussels 1995.
DE CORDIER, Thierry: 'Fugues', Ludion Editions N.V. 2002.
DE CORDIER, Thierry: 'Marc de Poèmes', Ludion, Ghent 2005.
DE CORDIER, Thierry: 'Un homme, une maison, un paysage', Editions Centre
Pompidou, 2005.
DE WULF, Bernard: 'Thierry De Cordier' (Fragment from 'De wijnjaren'
2002)
DE WULF, Bernard, TRICOT, Xavier, DE BAERE, Bart, LUYTEN, Anna,
VERHELST, Peter, HERTMANS, Stefan: ''Thierry de Cordier, De wijnjaren',
Ludion, Gent/Amsterdam, 2002
HERTMANS, Stefan: "Eenzaam op de marktplaats, Over het werk van Thierry
De Cordier " Hayen, Gent 1995.
HOET, Jan: 'Thierry De Cordier: 'Drawings 1983-1999', Ludion, Ghent 1999
STORSVE, Jonas: 'Un homme, une maison et un paysage', Centre Georges
Pompidou Service Commercial (2 novembre 2004)
VAN DE VEIRE, Frank: 'I love art' De Morgen, Juni, 2003
VERSCHAFFEL, Bart: Thierry de Cordier 1982-2002
VERSCHAFFEL, Bart en CORNELIS, Jef:
C'est moy que je peins",
documentary