For Un Été Au Havre, Isabelle Cornaro has continued her reflections on objects and their image and on the concept of original and copy. Invited to create a piece in the Le Havre train station, the artist was inspired by the iconic Saint-Joseph church, which struck a chord deep within her during her stays. In this, she has imagined a two-fold re-reading, in a double tribute to the talent of Auguste Perret. At the opening of the season, she transforms the large bay windows of the Le Havre train station, drawing inspiration from the colours of the church's stained-glass windows, designed by Marguerite Huré. Like the thousand colourful facets of the monument embracing the SNCF building, a multitude of cleverly arranged hues play against the movements of the sun and the clouds to bring the station's outer courtyard and interior hall to life. Transformed, the station becomes an echo, a resonance of the incessant chromatic variations of this famous Le Havre building.
To close the season and for the Heritage Days, the artist will unveil a work in tribute to the Saint-Joseph spire that she has chosen to interpret in a large oxidised bronze sculpture nearly 4 metres tall, which will join the collection of perennial Un Été Au Havre works.
With the title Coupes, the two pieces evoke a cinematic and photographic vocabulary in particular. These form literal cuts ('coupes') in the Le Havre landscape: transported elements that become autonomous, fragments borrowed from an emblem of the city's history that come to emancipate themselves here,taking on another life in our present.
Isabelle Cornaro's work is presented on various media and using many techniques: installation, drawing, sculpture, painting or video. In particular, she is fascinated by the relationship between decorative objects and the notion of "value" in art history. Deeply curious and attentive to the forms that surround us – even the most mundane – she invents situations that play on the perception of what we think we know or recognise. She also explores the relationships between forms and language (the transposition of painted figures into objects, films into graphic scores, ancient artistic techniques into contemporary practices and the vocabulary of minimal art into an emotional language, etc.)
