Atelier-Galerie A. Piroir | Exposition; Frédéric Cordier | Montreal | September 5 – October 7, 2023
September 5 – October 7, 2023
Atelier-Galerie A. Piroir
In-Person Viewing:
5333 avenue Casgrain, suite 802, Montréal, H2T 1X3, Canada
Frédéric Cordier’s work embodies a (post-)industrial imagination centered on fast food, factories or drilling rigs. His “vedute,” as he calls them, do not awe-inspire romantic 19th-century visions of blast furnaces depicted as steel monsters violating nature. Cordier’s frontal landscapes are imbued with objectivity, even if his engravings schematize reality or are pure “caprices”. Franz Gertsch started painting from photographs to free himself from his sentimentality. Similarly, Cordier’s engravings, as well as his ink drawings, paintings on perforated sheets and printed wallpapers seem to be reduced to the format of the bitmap image, either in black or, more rarely, in blue or white. . A binary aesthetic reinforced in his linocuts by the composition of his scenes with geometric shapes or segments that seem to have come out of the toolbox of drawing software. Whether figurative or abstract, his works are composed of repeating patterns that function as analog visualizations of our digital culture.
In today’s world of ubiquitous images, the sacred resides in the impalpable code. Each viewing of these digital coordinates on a screen is a generation that desecrates this absent original. Cordier, whose paintings on metal are inspired by repetitive and iconoclastic Islamic art, plays with these polarities of the sacred and the profane. His work demonstrates a fascination with the divine perfection of mass production. But it is through meticulous work using scissors, knives, pens and other tools that he seeks to imitate this standardization. The deliberate addition of errors or the dissolution of the motif is less reminiscent of a form of subjectivity permeating the works than of digital filters or algorithms applied to the image to disaggregate it. By his extensive manual work,
Frédéric Cordier is a Swiss-Canadian artist born in Montreal in 1985. He lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland and in Montreal, Canada. He holds a BFA from the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ecal).
