Born in 1976 in Seclin (FR)
As much a creator of environments as a sculptor, John Cornu presented his doctoral thesis in 2009 at Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, entitled ‘Art contextual et création’. With no particular favourite medium, he indulges in sculpture, video, neon, photography, installations, architectural grafts and performance. Subliminal yet obvious, poetic yet powerful, often black and geometric, his works offer a set of recurring principles: a relationship with the context, recourse to ‘materiological’ effects, using the minimal art codes of the 1960s and 1970s and a certain dose of romanticism, ruins and destruction.
Essentially created in situ, John Cornu’s interventions adapt to the space they are in, taking their context and their environment as a starting point. The artist likes to blur things, such as when he added to the original pilotis of the Villa Savoye, designed by Le Corbusier. Starting from the topographical, functional or human specificities of a place, he applies a reconfiguration, which on the one hand accentuates this specificity and, on the other, makes it evaporate into a newly created piece. He shakes up reality to better emphasise it and invites us to rethink the truth.
