FAVOURITE DESCENDING INTERVALS: Corentin Canesson

Corentin Canesson’s painting is a crowd-puller. The collective nature of his practice has long been underlined by all those who have written about his work: his exhibitions always end up as group shows curated by himself, often accompanied by concerts. In our case, the logic of dialogue arrives, as it often does, through music, the title of the exhibition, Favourite Descending Intervals, being borrowed from a song on Durutti Column’s third album, released in 1983. Two elements in the history of this English band specifically interested the artist, being in relation to his own work. To begin with, the cover of their first album, which was initially covered with sandpaper to damage neighbouring albums when put away (an idea stolen from Guy Debord, who applied the same principle to the cover of his Mémoires in 1958). Legend has it that it was Ian Curtis himself, the lead singer of Joy Division, who glued the paper together. Corentin Canesson also evokes the way in which the enigmatic Vini Reilly, the guitarist who almost single-handedly makes up the group, has been composing and playing the same music over and over again for over forty years, a model that enables him to think of his own sets of variations around which his visual practice is organized, as the title of the exhibition clearly suggests. So, even before we walk through the door, we are in the mental presence of the anarchist fighters of the Spanish Civil War, the entire Manchester music scene of the 1980s, the stormy Situationist community, and the artist himself. 

The paintings presented in the exhibition were produced in the artist’s new studio, who recently moved to Troyes, over a period of about a year — a relatively long period conducive to a form of reflection. This spatial, geographical and personal context has had measurable effects on the paintings. They have grown in size. New colors appeared, acid greens, mauve-violets. The painter allowed himself gestures that had been out of his practice, such as using large brushes, and even brooms, or turning canvases upside down. The exhibition thus focuses on a non-figurative part of the work, with compositions that are neither informal nor geometric, and which seem to be close-ups from earlier figurative or textual series. It is a way of reviewing his work in detail and examining it more closely. 

But once again, the collective logic unravels what at first appears to be the artist’s tête-à-tête with his own work. For any comment on the collaborative dimension of the painter’s practice misses the mark if it is not applied to the scale of the works themselves. “When I work, I’m always thinking about people,” he explains. But it is important to stress that “thinking about people” does not just mean quoting them. Thinking of people means borrowing a gesture (painting with a broom, for example), remembering a color, associating shapes, whispering a title, expressing gratitude, consoling oneself, paying homage. Thinking about people is what art is at its best for, whether we are making it, or looking at it as we wander endlessly through exhibitions. Art makes us exist within a community of living and dead with whom we maintain a silent, loving dialogue. 

So: in this new series, the deceptively square formats are references to Martin Barré. The colors and motifs sometimes evoke the color field of Morris Louis, the first-degree abstraction of Franz Kline (a little dynamized), the expressionism of Lee Krasner or the drawn paintings of Philip Guston. In these large-scale compositions, there is a floral tropism reminiscent of Simon Hantai. And in the tradition of Cobra painting, we can think here of one of the artist’s most central references, Don Van Vliet, the real name of the musician Captain Beefheart, whose work Corentin Canesson describes, with a touch of jealousy, as equally skilled and primitive. More classically, the specter of Matisse also haunts several paintings. For the living, we would like to mention Renée Levi’s tonic abstractions, Jean-François Maurige’s gesturality and his conception of continuous pictorial spaces, Clément Rodzielski’s elongated compositions, Hugo Pernet’s recent sketch-like paintings, the formal freedom of Delphine Coindet’s latest works, and Amy Sillman’s humorous chromatic intelligence, as well as her generous displays of works on paper.

Quite a long list of names (and a perfectly incomplete one for that matter), which brings us back to where we started: there are plenty of people in Corentin Canesson’s paintings. But that doesn’t mean it’s noisy (like a cluttered room, for example), even if he’s fond of music that knows how to get noticed. Nor is it talkative (in the sense of pompous, reference-saturated discourse). His painting is welcoming, actively inclusive. And one of its finest qualities lies in the balance, so difficult to maintain, between its great erudition and a form of assertive primitivism. Let us end with a word of wisdom from painter Amy Sillman: “After all, what’s life made of? You drag yourself to work, you eat a sandwich, you think about death, you call a friend, you get anxious, you walk the dog, you notice things, you have an idea, you take out the garbage, and you return to your easel (and that’s when you’re lucky)¹.”

Jill Gasparina

1_Amy Sillman, « Philip Guston, des poubelles jusqu’à Dieu », in Faux-Pas, Écrits et Dessins, translated – and edited – by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau et Benjamin Thorel, After 8 Books, Paris, p. 275-276