Thierry De Cordier

Singing in the Rain ...

1999

4500,00

Heliogravure on Zerkall 340 gsm paper

33,5 × 49,5 cm

Edition of 60 copies, signed and numbered by the artist

In stock

This edition is published by Friends of S.M.A.K.

Pick up at / ships in 5 to 10 business days from Brussels (BE)

about this work

Singing in the Rain… is a heliogravure based on Ecritoire n° 3 from 1993. The work consists of a photograph of the artist in his famous Ecritoire – a writing chair, currently in the collection of Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven – in what is presumably his garden, on which De Cordier wrote with Indian 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. In a way, this image is reminiscent of Marcel Broodthaers 1969 film La Pluie, in which he is trying to write while the rain constantly washes away the ink.

The original work on which this heliogravure was based – Ecritoire n° 3 – is in the collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris. This edition was made in 1999 by Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst and comes in it original folder.

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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Other works by Thierry De Cordier

Thierry De Cordier - Chagrin d'écrivain - 2004

Thierry De Cordier

Chagrin d'écrivain

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