As a set designer, she creates synopses combining photography and glass painting, to make her staged appearances dance within the strangeness of her sets. Her photographs are the screen onto which our dreams are projected.
Corinne Mercadier's artistic practice took a decisive turn in 1980 with her discovery of the Polaroid SX-70, which made photography her preferred medium—though she never abandoned drawing. She was captivated by the highly graphic quality of the photographs, whose grain is reminiscent of pastels, and whose strongly contrasting colors create a distance from the subject. From the outset, she conceived staged scenes and adopted the principle of double exposure, techniques that characterize all her subsequent work. By photographing her first subject, which was simply a matter of capturing an image, she enriched it with a personal perspective, both literally and figuratively. Working in series, she initially focused on landscapes, incorporating figures interacting with objects, but also on isolated objects radiating a luminous aura, on architecture, which forms a fundamental element of her compositions, on rooftops, and on the sky…
With her Glasstypes of 1987, she introduced a new and meticulous technique into her work: paintings on glass with almost stained-glass-like colors, photographed with a Polaroid camera. Passionate about art history, she drew inspiration from the Annunciation fresco by Giotto (1266 or 1267-1337) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, transforming the painter's architectural elements with her photographs.
The year 2000 marked a new turning point, with the beginning of her outdoor shoots, requiring more elaborate set design. From then on, her ideas took shape in her sketchbooks, where she modeled what she wanted to see. For her scenes, she made the objects and costumes for her characters herself, who, since the series " Once and No More ," have been posing as if lost in their reveries. While everything is calculated and planned, Corinne Mercadier nevertheless invites chance onto the film by playing with the exposure time of the first shot. She thus creates "events," like the effects generated by her thrown objects—indefinable, ghostly, floating images that symbolize the fate of her characters. In her studio, she then reworks the lighting to theatricalize the images, and creates color Polaroid photographs from black and white Leica shots.
With the transition to digital photography in 2008, she continued her experiments in the vein of Polaroid, reworking her photographs in post-production using Photoshop to play with color and light, darkening her skies as she has done since her early work, and shading her scenes. This creates interstellar atmospheres where her characters seem confronted with their destiny, or inverts values in abandoned places, where forms radiate light where the eye would expect to see shadows. While each element of the composition is immediately recognizable, their incongruous association in a strange light generates a disconnect from reality and creates the sensation of a mental image. Recurring motifs in her synopses include a frontal image, a classical perspective, a character, a thrown object, a costume, and light. In her series * Magnetic Night * , from 2022 to 2024, human beings are replaced by "informal forms," highlighting her interest in dance. Starting with an uninhabited interior that she photographs, she imagines what might happen there, creating apparitions in the form of clouds and dancing smoke painted on glass. "It's a bit like being a lighting designer in a theater ," explains the artist, who creates the drama by staging their movement. With her sophisticated visual constructions that open the doors to imaginary worlds imbued with a strange poetry, Corinne Mercadier invites us into a waking dream.
Represented by the Binome Gallery
Corinne Mercadier has published most of her books with Filigranes publishers: Where does the sky begin?, Dreaming Journal , The Arles sequel , Before a dark field , and a monograph.
filigranes.com/artiste/mercadier-corinne/
Podcast links:
open.spotify.com/episode/0ZGf9258K0noiKCKl3X8Jd
francefineart.com/2024/12/22/3584_corinne-mercadier_galerie-binome
francefineart.com/2022/05/18/3259_corinne-mercadier
artvisions.fr/fr/portfolio-item/corinne-mercadier-paris-galerie-binome-du-14-mai-au-16-juillet-2022
