展期 Period：
2024.5.26—2024.7.14
艺术家 Artist：
策展人 Curator：
地点 Venue：
前言 Foreword：
法国艺术家伊莎贝尔·科纳罗在今日美术馆的个展将以艺术家创作于2007年的早期摄影系列“班吉和乌图班吉河周围的大草原”拉开帷幕。科纳罗在木板上放置和排列母亲的首饰和珠宝，这些弯曲的形状与木纹交织，象征了艺术家曾度过部分童年时光的中非共和国的自然风景。在试图质疑日常物、装饰品与艺术品之间的界限的同时，艺术家也通过“风景”这一概念对西方在非洲的殖民历史和资源掠夺进行反思。正是从这一时期开始，艺术家持续挖掘和探索风景的情感、社会和历史寓意，预示了其后期“风景”装置系列的开端。
为此次展览全新创作的两件装置作品《风景XV》和《风景XVI》来自艺术家最具代表性的同名系列。科纳罗拥有专业的艺术史学习背景，就像她摆弄母亲的首饰那样地，她再一次在西方古典绘画传统中找到对排列、构图和组合逻辑的兴趣。她进而意识到，这些问题不仅存在于画面中，也与这些作品在西方美术馆被储存和被展示的方式和系统息息相关。画面里的透视和观众的位置都是视角的问题，即关乎“权威”的问题：这些选择决定了我们将如何观看。在对画面中的透视和构图系统进行抽丝剥茧般的分析后，科纳罗进行大刀阔斧的精准提炼。她突破绘画的二维世界，以三维装置的方式让观众直接置身于风景之中，自由地选择多重视角，尽情徘徊。
“风景”系列尤其关乎图像再现的问题，而这一问题将进一步在艺术家的影像创作及媒介之间的转化中得以体现。在科纳罗的影像中，我们将再次看到风景装置里的熟悉物件。而此次展出的五幅“再现”系列大型绘画作品所再现的，正是这些影像被放大数倍的静帧。在展览的最后，一组墙上“序列”系列作品再次提出“序列性”的问题，每件单独的作品都是一个大主题的一部分。它们的排列和组合逐渐延展成一幅完整的全景图，这又让我们回到影像扫描和剪辑的逻辑中去。更有趣的是，对艺术家而言，影像就是对现实的另一种“浇铸”。通过此次展览，我们将得以沉浸式地进入艺术家在多重媒介之间自由游走和实验，将物与图像编织交汇而成的当代现实“风景”。
Isabelle Cornaro's solo exhibition at the Today Art Museum opens with her early photographic series Savane autour de Bangui et le fleuve Utubangui, created in 2007. In this series, Cornaro positions her mother’s jewelry and trinkets on wooden panels. The curved forms of those jewelry and trinkets intertwine with the wood grain to evoke the natural scenery of the Central African Republic, where Cornaro partly spent her childhood. While attempting to question the boundaries between the everyday objects, the ornamental, and the artistic, Cornaro also contemplates the legacy of Western colonization and Africa’s resource exploitation through the notion of “landscape”. This period lays the groundwork for Cornaro’s ongoing exploration into the emotional, societal, and historical dimensions of landscape, hinting at the inception of her later Paysages installation series.
The two new installations unveiled for this exhibition, titled Paysages XV and Paysages XVI, stem from the artist's renowned Paysages series. With an academic background in art history, Cornaro reignited her fascination with the principles of arrangement, composition, and assemblage intrinsic to classical Western painting, reminiscent of her earlier exploration of her mother's jewelry. She further recognizes that these concerns lie beyond the pictorial frame to the storage and display mechanisms in Western museums. The perspective within the frame and the position of the audience are both matters of perspective, which is essentially a matter of "authority": these choices determine what, where and how we look. Through exhaustive scrutiny of perspectives and compositions inside the paintings, Cornaro undertakes a radical and meticulous refinement. Departing from the confines of the two-dimensionality of traditional paintings, she employs three-dimensional installations to immerse the viewer directly within the landscape, granting them to explore myriad perspectives and wander at will.
The Reproductions series delves deeply into the realm of image reproduction, a theme echoed in the artist's films and the seamless transitions among various mediums. In Cornaro's films, familiar elements from her Landscape installations can be spotted. The exhibition also showcases five large-scale paintings from Reproductions, which depict enlarged stills from the same films, reminiscent of the history of abstraction. Towards the exhibition's conclusion, a series titled Séquence, prompting contemplation on the concept of “seriality”, wherein each piece contributes to a broader imagery. As these works are arranged and combined, they gradually unfold into a panoramic vista, underscoring similar principles from image scanning and film editing. Notably, for Cornaro, the image serves as another means of “casting” reality. Through this exhibition, audiences are invited to immersively traverse the landscape of contemporary reality, wherein Cornaro freely roams and experiments across diverse media, intertwining objects and imagery with ease.
