Corin Vanden Berghe’s painting is essentially figurative, although at times, or in places, there are abstract escapes. There is always a fundamental idea around which the painting is built, but the proposed image allows several levels of reading. Sometimes the painting has no meaning, often several.

The colors, the lines, the harmony and the chaos, the clarity of the image, at the same time as its concealment are part of her pictorial research. The paintings of recent years have focused on Brutalist and Modernist architecture. Houses, buildings, which represent states of mind rather than constructions.

In some paintings, a character is placed in a vegetal and architectural environment and one can guess the loneliness and lack of sense of our human condition. Free women languish in lush vegetation. Mountains and angels are also present, and these, through statues, give us to see that there are other dimensions beyond the four known dimensions.

Her path is currently oriented towards a painting that intrinsically mixes abstraction and figuration, in the form of the representation of mental space. To paint mental space rather than objects or subjects. But her ultimate quest is the luminous depth. She seeks to express in each painting a primitive and luminous dark poetry.

 

On October 1st, 1976, Raphaëlle Billetdoux published her novel “Prends garde à la douceur des choses” with Seuil Editions. According to Wikipedia, the title comes from a line by Paul-Jean Toulet, from the poem “En Arles”. I haven’t read Paul-Jean Toulet, nor Raphaëlle Billetdoux for that matter – subject or object? Let’s leave the delightful ambiguity to unfold its possibilities here. However, a few months ago, I came across the paintings of Corin Vanden Berghe for the first time. This discovery immediately brought to mind that line from a poem by an unknown poet to me, mentioned in the title of a book I haven’t read. Strange correspondences. Mysterious signs exchanged, half a century apart, by artists through the lens of an amateur gaze. History does not tell – at least not yet, maybe someday I’ll expand my research – if the title came to the novelist from a Rimbaudian correspondence between her surname and the verse she named her novel after…

“Prends garde à la douceur…” my initial impressions said. Indeed, the paintings of Corin Vanden Berghe are initially gentle. Ethereal, diaphanous, pastel – these are the epithets that emerged immediately after the title waved as a banner over the work. When, in transparency, the silhouette or figure of an angel appears here and there, as if erased, we find ourselves firmly ensnared in the trap of sweetness. However, upon closer inspection, a snag reveals itself. To dispel a misunderstanding?
 

*** The angel’s skin is soft, so named is the fabric from which Maison Repetto®, the official supplier of the Paris Opera, makes the leotards for its tutus. Soft are the wings of the swans, white or black, in Tchaikovsky’s ballet. Soft, one imagines, is the wing of this strangely landed angel on a gutter prominence, over a basin – which could just as well be a moat. Dancing invisibly in a gray sky corner, Maïa Plissetskaïa; a white swan dies;

Corin Vanden Berghe’s angel, fallen from the sky, stands atop a strange chain, between gargoyle-chimney and catapult-gutter, of an architect’s house. Remember. Late 80s. Wim Wenders’ film… Wings of Desire. Wenders’ angel, Bruno Ganz in the city, from the top of the Berlin Cathedral, casts a perplexed gaze towards the human throngs below. Are they cousins, brothers, fathers, sons, men or women, men and women, these heavenly messengers, who came to help us, rescue us, once in Berlin with Wenders, here in Brussels under the brush of Corin Vanden Berghe, everywhere else, one assumes; visible only to those who know how to see them? Yes, indeed, let’s beware of these winged beings present-absent everywhere in Corin’s work. That of the first painting I saw. Abandoned, innocent to the inattentive and impatient gaze, it soon seizes you with a disquieting strangeness.

The angel’s wings are tightly folded, we only see one. And if this angel fell, poorly equipped with its miserable parachute? Could he still spread those damaged, dysfunctional wings to escape the deadly law of gravity? The dangerous, sometimes fatal law of Desire? Is he truly an angel, not an actor, or worse, an impostor? He looks so sad! The sky is so gray, so empty!

“When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid Upon the spirit aching for the light,”

A sort of Baudelairian spleen takes hold of us. Ah, on the left: a staircase that the angel can descend step by step, without having to throw himself from the roof. We are reassured! Is our angel tempted by an impossible suicide? Is he, like the Wandering Jew, searching for his Pandora, to finally find eternal rest? What is at the end of this chain, like a rack hanging on the edge of the gutter, from where he could leap, fall, fly, who knows… We don’t see clearly what this chain supports, since it plunges, like the attachment of a marine anchor, into God knows what abysses… And then this somewhat artificial vegetation, straight out of the architect’s drawing, this door under the staircase, leading to what cellar, what vault, or labyrinth, what underground… Brr, decidedly, brr…

This angel, destined to save us, is he also in distress? Oh! Lost? Do you think so? Shouldn’t we, each in turn after all, cherish him too, if he is wounded? To care for him, keep him company if he feels alone? If he feels alone when God is absent and forgets him, when God forgets us all and weighs down on us the lid of the gray, low, heavy sky. What do we know of his (dreamed?) angelic life, after all? Of his torments, of the worries we cause him? Huh? What do we know about it? “We are amputated at the shoulder of the wing Bend in my hand your trembling hand.” Aragon, The Rooms, Poem of time that does not pass.
 

*** “What does woman want?” Freud asked. Is the painting titled “Illusion of Melancholy” dedicated to her? It doesn’t seem so, we just like to imagine it. Piece of galaxy, part of a cosmic puzzle, is the famous black continent where the blue flower comes from, a gem set in a mount that looks like reinforced concrete? “I am fascinated by black holes,” Corin tells me as he presents the work to me, right on the floor of his studio. Then the first verses of El Desdichado come to mind: “I am the dark one, the widower, the inconsolable, The prince of Aquitaine with the abolished tower. My only star is dead, and my constellation-laden lute Bears the black sun of melancholy.”
 

An imaginary museum is being built. As these paintings parade by, smooth and gentle in their surface and appearance games; as long as we remain somewhat distant from the suicidal angels, galactic faults, false perspectives, staircases whose origins and destinations we do not know; as long as we yield to the ease of surface and smoothness: nothing, it seems, grabs us and we can slowly slide from one canvas to another…

But beware! Black hole! “In astrophysics, a black hole is a celestial object so compact that the intensity of its gravitational field prevents any form of matter or radiation from escaping. Such objects cannot emit or diffuse light and are therefore black, which in astronomy means they are optically invisible.” Is there, in Corin’s imagination, any kind of non-relationship between these asexual angels, assigned to light, and these black cavities – of the feminine? – where light itself is absorbed and dissipated?
 

Eleven categories defined by the painter to describe his work, as it stands: mental space, mountain, angel, house, woman, brutalism, brutal, vegetal, dialogue with the angel, interiors, non-representation. It is better to proceed in this way than to submit to the conventional segmentation of chronological periods. Corin's universe breaks free from temporality, in Proustian effects of spatial contiguity. Visions emerging from a dream that one never knows whether it is a dream or a nightmare. Desired woman turning her back. Effigy of the artist huddled up. Celestial escalators. Suburban self-portrait, like a reinterpretation of Watteau's Gilles: the same feeling of sadness and dismay, if it weren't for the figure of the angel in the background... Should we wait and reach the beyond to know joy?

 

Brutalism and Brutal: you see, under the seraphic pastels of the ether, these concrete buildings, they say reinforced? These straight lines, these sharp angles? Virile force without affectation. From the hand of the Grand Architect? Beware, we warned you, of the gentleness of these things that Corin places - discreetly, at the bottom? - on the surface of his works. Beware, I say, for you might, by distraction or carelessness, find yourself upside down, like lying standing, in these bits of plans with double and reversed orientations... You could - watch out! Look where you're stepping! - slip from one room to another and find yourself in another space-time, somewhere, do we know exactly where? In this multiverse that our physicists today describe through their mathematical formulas?

 

You are taken by the Mysterious Abductors, you are lost, squeezed, centrifuged.

Lost, in fact.

But the angel is there, somewhere, drawn or absent. He watches. He indicates the direction to follow. Amiable and complacent guardian, sometimes, of the mental museums whose rooms we visit, some peacefully, others in a hurry.

"Corin Vanden Berghe? Northwest wing. Second floor. Take the escalator downstairs, station The Origin of the World. Then ask the seraph who often dozes off in his chair, he will tell you..."

"Oh, by the way! Don't linger: we close at five. Otherwise, come back tomorrow..."

"This is not the floor here."

Aragon, ibid.

Is it the works that parade before me like living mannequins on a podium? Is it me, on the contrary, who walks through the rooms whose walls they reveal? There is something that seizes you (iron hand, velvet glove) in Corin's canvases. Nothing insidious in this psychic occupation, even if the invasion has occurred in stages, on tiptoe. Of all that I read about this painting, a common opinion emerges: the work questions us. I add: it questions without violence, but without weakness. It confesses its distress, comes to seek ours. Its figures as well as its figurations flatten a world yet worked by elevation and depth. Therein lies no small paradox.

 

Brutality, gentleness. Verticality, horizontality. Thickness, surface. From these antagonisms, Corin draws a work, not only singular, banal to say, but above all disconcerting.

What would the psychoanalyst say? Surely nonsense, since the interpretation of such an artist's work requires the expression of an unconscious that is the painter's... not that of the analyst.

And the aesthete? That Corin's work, without repudiating beauty - a facility serving more than once as an alibi for bad painting - does not sacrifice in any way to the temptation of the pretty. As for sweetness, you now know what I think; and I have not finished, far from it, chewing on all these nuances of pallor, which, in certain respects, remind me of Chinese works, praise(s) of blandness, spoken so well by François Jullien, sinologist philosopher.

And then, I will have warned you, stay on your guard, you could be surprised!

See those reds and those opiate ochres from some time ago. They might well come back, as they rise to the surface... And that thunderous blue, from the recent canvas, which I like to call Nervalian, Illusion of Melancholy. This blue of a central blotter that attracts and absorbs everything. Evanescent or venomous flower? Woman's sex above the black hole that could just as easily become a continent? Desire and anguish: a cursed couple spoken of by these divers of the depths, whom I refuse to make speak here, to leave to the artist alone, the enjoyment of his delirium. Of his creation. Of his creatures.

***

Let's talk little... the strength of the work is without fanfare; it just grabs you. Unassumingly, with small strokes of millimetered brushes for backgrounds and surfaces: details in myriads. Approaching like a camera-eye for a magnification of the void, which, we know, is neither nothingness, nor nothing. But something hollow; a hole, a fissure in the concrete rock of reality, and the brutality of life except for angels.

A fur, half-silk half-hair, garnishes here the rough. Opulent fleece and pumice stone softness. These houses outside the walls dislodge our desires. The feminine is everywhere elusive: petals, silhouettes, cellars and caves, small l for width, big P for Depth... The masculine, feverish wanderer, erects buildings, limits spaces, small l for length, big H for Height.

In Corn Woman, the vegetal texture of corn plants encases the hieratic body of a woman, post-modern caryatid of the low and heavy sky: always low; perhaps a little less heavy, since carried; but black, very black, like the homothetic holes of Corin's starless Universe.

The matter is never voluminous, the brushstroke never smooth. The manner, however, simple and of clinical precision, has the elegance of never seeking to impress. It is a work that must be frequented, like the aisles of a labyrinth, to find one's way. Everything is suggested, nothing imposed. Sweetness itself, as we have seen, is only a thin film. One must go beyond appearances. Painting of the ineffable and the intangible. Gesture ranging from abrupt to furtive. Work in black as much as denim work in blue jeans, we have not finished fooling ourselves, at the turn of a mosaic of tones on tones.

***

I go back on my steps. Passed too quickly, for sure, in this corridor of space-time, which goes from 2012 to 2022. Corin's painting affirmed itself there in its choices. Tirelessly, the artist has put the work back on the loom: quasi-obsessive themes, which return, in this period, with even more strength and depth.

 

Clearing, for example, hollows out the matter in its center to show only light. Antithetical figure to that of the black hole. Here we are now facing an almost-white burst of dazzlement, in the midst of Japanese foliage. The Guardian of the forest, ancient sage in a toga, a samurai, or Merlin the Enchanter in a hallucinated Brocéliande: light always, central and encircled, cuts through the foreground like a laser, allowing us to glimpse, here, very close by, in Between the Trees, those hinterlands where the source of pure consciousness might reside. Light captured in the hollow, through the magic of contrast.

 

As for love...

Let's talk about it! It is experienced, in Corin's work, between figurative realism and the mystique of the beyond. Belly to back rather than face to face, it is practiced between two, amidst wanderings and spatiotemporal voyages. Between the most naturalistic crudeness and sensual accumulations, à la Manet or Klimt. Here, the matter is calm. Such as Olympia (Barely), knowing herself desirable, and desired, the woman triumphs (My sweet bride). Then she turns away and escapes by (ex)orbiting (Gravitational). Impudent and fatal, she exhibits to the entire world, legs spread, the well-guarded black fortress of her mystery at the depths of forests, chasms, caves. (In the forest).

Who is this LoveToy in Wonderland? A fragment of the painter's self, amputated like half an orange in desperate search of the other half? Player or toy? An uncatchable silhouette in shadow play. In the background, diaphanous, an imperial woman rides. Are we ghosts? the painter wonders. Are we returning from elsewhere, from another place we have completely forgotten? Is it in this unsettling-reassuring elsewhere—just as much below as above, in Corin's work, thanks to the reversals he instructs us—that we return? What do the messengers of all the sweet and pleasant news, our dear angels of the Annunciation, resurrections, and above all, consolations, tell us?

 

Similar to Maurice de Guérin's centaur, the painter exclaims, facing his unfinished canvas:

"And I roamed, all agitated in my shadows."

(Lost soul)

Later, enigmatic, sententious:

"However, we emerge later from our caves

Than you from your cradles."

 

I stammer... Now it's time to stagger, for it's a quest with an uncertain destiny...

"Nothing is certain to me except the uncertain thing," lamented Villon.

I stumble and cling here to a pubic forest, there to the sexless wings of desire, further still to this passable, and who knows? reversible? frontier of death. On this side, the ultimate transport, with a revolver, in Before dying. Ecstasy as exquisite as it is fatal. On that side, posthumous rapture on the wings of an angel.

Love, yes, okay, but as Artaud bellowed:

"And love? We must wash ourselves

Of this hereditary filth

Where our stellar vermin

Continues to bask."

 

We seek sources, in Corin's painting, other than light amidst the darkness of existence. A bit of water sometimes, in these deserts of the soul that we must cross? Burn ourselves first, more with dryness than with fire, then quench ourselves... Let desire die. A sexual Niagara, of sperm or of female ejaculation, irrigating the hurtful rocks upon which the skiffs of our lives tear apart...

We bathe...

Baths of light without stars, streams of lava instead of fountain water... So where to drink? Yes, but where? The lake is frozen (Frozen lake). Ah, water at last, we were dying of thirst, much more than desire. We had to drink and cleanse ourselves... Aquatic canopy, then Mental Garden. Is this about a trans baptism? Isn't every baptism trans? Since it requires moving from one space (mental) to another, from one state (of consciousness) to another, from concave to convex, from reverse to obverse, from shadow to light, from feminine to masculine, from old life to new life. And vice versa.

It is to these subtle reversals that Corin Vanden Berghe's work leads us. Poetically, luminously, darkly, geometrically, infinitely. Past, of course, the first gates of the erroneous perception of smoothness, fragility, and paleness. Past, therefore, the more initial than initiatory trap of sweetness.

 

Let's take a break while waiting for the continuation, let's dwell for a moment on this transgender Mona Lisa. A synthesis gathering, in trompe-l'oeil and wink. Everything may not be there, but much is found: the structuring of the plane, the stacking, the background landscape, meticulous, dreamlike and trans-lucid; the enigmatic face of... who, by the way? The angel, the painter, a celestial entity, a reminiscence of a Roman or Greek bust? In place of Leonardo's sfumato, Corin substitutes his own technique. Accomplished, demanding—and so ungrateful! Yes, ungrateful, since it addresses us, from the twenty-first century: inattentive, distracted, neither seers nor clear; just a little bit clerks, that's all.

But doesn't the artist already hold his revenge? Aren't we, you and I, these same and different, already trans, passed from hurried passersby to leisurely pedestrians?

We who now eagerly await our next transits, in the universe of a painter today in pure consciousness, master of enchantments.

Brussels, December 12, 2022.

Hay de Talbe.