'Fish Thoughts' Patrick Corillon: Musée des Arts Contemporains, Belgium

Sarah McFadden

The odd title, "Fish Thoughts," comes from Patrick Corillon’s analogy of the behavior of human thoughts to that of fish breaking the surface of the water and disappearing again. It signals the off-beat Romanticism in his work, which affectionately and only partly ironically imputes mystery and profundity to the most ordinary things. Comprised of eight new pieces, his latest exhibition is presented as a journey north along the Meuse River, with stops in Domrémy, Verdun, Charleville, Liege, Maastricht, Rotterdam and two nameless spots in between. The conceit of the voyage envelops the works in a meta-fiction that confers cartographic logic to their sequencing and metaphorical resonance (life is a river of stories) to the whole.

Corillon’s mixed-media installations serve as elliptical mises-en-scène for the literary texts embedded in their midst. Written by the artist in the dignified measures of the passé historique, these short, winsome narratives are tender reminders of the human need to explain everything, rationally or not, and of the crucial roles played by the imagination in meeting that need. Within the space of a few paragraphs, Corillon’s tales encompass the humdrum and the uncanny and lead from one order of reality to another. Their focus oscillates between the real and the imaginary, the microscopic and the architectural, the physiological and the psychological, the ill-fated and the providential; and their preposterous, poignant plots are rooted in bizarre misunderstandings and all-too-human longings.

The material character of the texts differs from one installation to the next. Inlaid in the floor, printed on wall-mounted light boxes, as newspaper articles, or on signs, they are as diverse as their accompanying accessories, which include framed squares of blotting paper, aquariums stocked with tropical fish, a video presuming to show the resemblance of parasites to their hosts, and a rickety sculpture representing a low bridge over the Meuse.

Corillon puts readers/viewers inside his stories. Showcasing disparate bits of tangible “evidence” related to the texts, his installations, like Proust’s madeleine, trigger a mental conjuring of the worlds of the texts, reminding us that in important respects, every art work we?re confronted with is our own creation.

The World Wars form the invisible backdrops to the narratives staged in Domrémy and Verdun. Six modernist paintings (by Ensor, Le Corbusier, Sonia Delaunay, etc.) from the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the artist’s home town, Liege, are accessories to one of the three tales, all relating to art, set there. Language is ailing in Rimbaud’s birthplace, Charleville; in a swampy region in southern Holland, apocryphal parasites are identified as the agents of behavioral anomalies in humans. In a hotel in Maastricht, a dying man searches for the right room in which to spend the remainder of his days. The mood is light despite undercurrents of failed utopias, human suffering and delusion.

Two works stand out. One (Charleville), consists of a pair of animated films which, by privileging visual images over language, fail to engage the imagination the way the other works do. The other, arguably Corillon’s finest achievement so far, is a metaphysical puppet play enacted by hand-written paper scrolls in assorted colors, sizes and geometric shapes. Positioned on conventional marionette rails, which allow for lateral movement across the stage, the scrolls enter, unfurl, exit, and are replaced by others. Thus, the plot advances. It’s precisely the paucity of visual information that makes the performance riveting.

Like many of Corillon’s works, the puppet play was inspired by a true story ? a particularly moving one about a puppeteer in the Warsaw ghetto. Another story informs the artist’s entire oeuvre, although it hasn’t (yet) featured as the basis for a specific piece. It comes from the artist’s own experience of observing an old man in a public garden, intently reading signs identifying the plants that had been removed. The words were all he needed.

On view at the Musée des Arts Contemporains, Belgium until July 17. Corillon’s next exhibition, "Les Oblomons," will be shown at the Centre Nationale de la Danse, Paris, from Oct. 28 to the end of January 2006.