Thierry De Cordier
Singing in the Rain ...
1999
€4200,00
Heliogravure on Zerkall 340 gsm paper
33,5 × 49,5 cm
Edition of 60 copies, signed and numbered by the artist
In stock
about this work
This edition is based on Ecritoire n° 3 from 1993, which is in the collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris. The work shows the artist at his famous Ecritoire (a writing chair, in the collection of the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven) in his garden in Schorisse. For a long time, his garden was for De Cordier the place where he found the peace to think and work, in harmony with nature. On this picture, he wrote in India ink ‘I am singing in the rain … I am singing in the rain … a trendy refrain … and I am happy again’ and drew a very local downpour coming from his umbrella.
It is an iconic image showing the hermit, withdrawn in his shelter in Schorisse. De Cordier is a writer-artist, an uneducated thinker whose worldview draws heavily on Albert Camus’ concept of absurdism, which describes the futility of searching for meaning in an incomprehensible universe, devoid of God or meaning. In other words, people only exist. Or, as De Cordier says: ‘Inutile, l’homme est là à être là inutilement…’ [Useless, man is just there to be useless…].
The first image shows the edition Singing in the rain, 1999. The second image shows Ecritoire n° 3, 1993.
about Thierry De Cordier
Thierry De Cordier is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and poet. As a young artist, he lived a nomadic existence that led him to reflect upon architecture as a model for social relations. For a long time, his garden was a substitute and a metaphor for the world. Later, he turned his back to the world to look at the sea.
De Cordier is an existential artist who tries to understand the world through his own experience. His work is the result of a personal quest: a search for his own identity, his relationship to the world, and his role within society. His work, in which the infinitely small is reflected in the infinitely big, develops organically from his inner psyche.
His desolate landscapes, seascapes and mountains are amongst his recent themes, partly inspired by the vast, black and white topographies of 17th and 18th-century Chinese painting, they also capture the essential qualities of the landscape and light of Northern Europe. The grey skies and ink-black seas in his paintings evoke melancholy, with the most dramatic scenes being those in which waves and mountainous cliffs fuse together to embody the forces of nature within a single primal image.
The subject of God and the definition or non-definition of God is at the core of a different group of works. Ranging from vast fields of paper where blue ink assembles into a cascade of text, to singular definitions, De Cordier’s calligraphic works communicate the artist’s illogical definitions of God. Oscillating between the absurd and the sacred, the words become the spiritual medium of an image that strives to materialise the invisible.
(courtesy of Xavier Hufkens)
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