PÉNINSULES

There are artists who have a brutal inertia and others who are reclusively inclined, both symmetrical ways of separating art from life. This great modernist separation remains significantly followed. Separating oneself from the world and its breath, its increasing fragility, was never something Cedric Le Corf consented to. He does not practice detachment or indifference, and refuses to break with the natural order. The order itself, not merely its depiction: an order that is hard to define, irreducible to our reason, and all the more necessary to excavate from within, through the irrepressible energy of the shapes.

More than figurative, Cedric Le Corf’s sculptures, prints, and drawings consequently capture the heart, perhaps sacredly, through organic mystery in which we are merely the ephemeral passengers. What is it made of, this world, his world, which he himself calls baroque, out of expressionist choice and active listening of its elements, in which he seeks his proper place? The anatomy, both human and animal, seems to be the key player, and almost the implacable law from which derive all kinds of bones: skulls, jaws, limbs, fragments... If it were not for the fact that Le Corf employs materials, from wood to porcelain, which immediately restore the truth of his approach, one might say of Le Corf that he strips more than he sculpts.

His darkest works, which evoke Gericault and Delacroix (although there’s no banal mimicry), contain a tender, active, rough humour, which is not the effect of overly clever contrasts. Rather there is a suggestion, since there is an element of the baroque, of a sense of the circulations and mutations at the heart of which the vital forces victoriously confront the powers of suffering, doubt and death. It’s no secret that Le Corf’s curiosity has always taken him in the direction of those humanists most determined to understand the machinery of bodies and fluids responsible for such a miraculous operation. Michael Servetis, a martyr for truth, and Andreas Vesalius sit in his imaginary pantheon, as do the somewhat closer Philippe Etienne Lafosse, Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty and Honore Fragonard, cousin to the famous painter. In the ancient world, anatomy and dissection were one and the same: there was no alternative to opening up the body in order to understand. But what of art, where the “open form” often remains an excuse for works empty of any meaning. I like Le Corf’s response and his way of naturally reconnecting with the great Sevillians, from Montañés to the young Velazquez (beyond the Romantics and Baselitz). For them, depiction was suddenly threatened by its very realism, figuration by disfiguration. The boundaries gently fall away and, as Le Corf might say, bodies become landscapes. In blurring the kingdoms, anatomy comes to life and enchants us.

— Stéphane Guégan
Scientific advisor to the Presidency of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie