Patrick Corillon
Born an 25th August
1959 in Knokke, Belgium.
Lives and works between Paris and Liege.
Patrick
Corillon has affinities with Borges and the Portuguese poet Fernando
Pessoa whose art consisted
in creating imaginary characters. friends, acquaintances far whom he constructed
entire lives, and with whom he maintained close relationships.
In the same way, Patrick Corillon has created same ten different characters
which he develops from exhibition to exhibition by dropping tiny hints
of their biographies. At first, their identities were not revealed. But,
in 1988, the artist brusquely changed the rules of the game by lifting
the veils of anonymity from these fictitious characters of another age,
like Oskar Serti, a Hungarian writer, born 1881, died 1959. In the manner
of a top reporter, Patrick Corillon plays with the figure of an artist
travelling from spot to spot in order to realise exhibitions relating critical
episodes and romantic adventures from the lives of each of the invited
characters. It's an image of art as adventure, as risk, along with a reference
to the imaginary worlds of childhood.
From scene to scene, the characters bounce back in different guises, caught
in the act at any time or place, like in a television series, or Hergé comic
that doesn't require any chronological reading of its heroes' escapades
: a savoraus metaphor of the work itself. A work that runs counter to the
times, unveiling itself chastely, bit by bit, without ever giving in to
the image. This is an open work, in the sense Umberto Eco gives to the
term, an unending unfolding, a hypertext which opens out to infinity. At
the same time, you could just pass by these pieces without even seeing
them, so closely do they cling to the context, adapting the written word
as their obligatory code of access.
Far from being a destabilising trick, Patrick Corillon's trivial anecdotes
and insignificant slices of his characters' day-to-day existence all have
roots in the places where they come to life. For this artist, fiction is
a postulate of reality, not an escape from the real, but a way of coming
closer to it. A method of investigation.
In an unassuming way, Patrick Corillon gives the viewer back the active
role he took an with Duchamp, as reader of contemporary art. The role of
the actor who brings the work to life. His anecdotes formulate punctual
screens of mental images far the individual. To render visible the invisible,
to project one's own cinema: this is the artist's invitation. But only
for those who know how to read, who know how to see. To be continued...
Jérôme Sans
Galeries Magazine, n° 53, février-mars 1993
1 Fernando Pessoa, Sur les Hétéronymes, éditions
Unes, Le Muy, page 23.
2 Georges Steiner, Réelles Présences, éditions Gallimard,
1989, Paris, page 80.
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