Artist of the day: Artist of the fay, June 19: Jean-Louis Corby, a French Postwar & Contemporary sculptor (#723)

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Artist of the fay, June 19: Jean-Louis Corby, a French Postwar & Contemporary sculptor (#723)

Jean-Louis Corby (1951) is a French Postwar & Contemporary sculptor. I feel it is particularly difficult, if not impossible to say or write anything that is likely to make sense about Corby’s work while trying to remain distant and vigilant. That means that each contact of any length with one or more of his works is a highly individual experience: like passing something by if one doesn’t watch out, which goes without saying, or being struck by a movement, a shape, a sense of rhythm, a detail, a symbol. In that case, one would not be able to form an assessment based on the opinion of someone else, because both the detail (hands and feet) and the abstract nature (rhythm in general) or the composition of shapes assume or provoke an entirely personal point of view.

While that applies to a large extent to all works of art, this consideration applies in some way when one is talking about the special radiance of Corby’s sculptures. Anyone who remains neutral and impassive entirely misses the point. The human being (asexual) that Corby has invented is represented in its duplicity, strength, subtlety, lack of freedom or emotional way of escaping from the slings and arrows imposed on it, its triumphs, its universal yet at the same time personal and unique plastic language that seizes each of us in our innermost consciousness.

What looks initially like a formal and playful contrast in the eyes of a person coming into contact –superficially – with Corby’s work for the first time, gradually becomes the attaching fulfilment of a number of things, situations or states of mind, an exciting synthesis of form and thought, mind and matter, just as the total work of the artist is basically a synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde, of subtle representation and an original concept.

Corby is in a class of his own as a sculptor in the sense that he is an attentive storyteller, while at the same time he produces a sculptural interpretation that is superior to a somewhat banal fact. In this way, he relieves an «ambiguous» human appearance of any anecdotal burden by using a playful metamorphosis and surprising formal language.

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