Sans Foi ni Particule
Isabelle de Maison Rouge, 2017
“Sans foi ni particule” (“Without Faith or Particle”)—an odd title for an artist’s book, and a curious declaration from its author…
As a child of faith, Corine Borgnet awaited miracles. When they failed to appear, she gradually let go of the unconditional, irrational trust she had placed in God and in the religious practices of her upbringing—intertwined with the magical beliefs of childhood: fairies, ghosts, Santa Claus. When the magic stopped working, she turned away from the divine—though without rejecting religious institutions outright or becoming anticlerical. No longer believing in a god who could change her life with a wave of a wand, perhaps her faith transformed into a belief in humanity and progress—a faith stripped of religious connotation, grounded instead in philosophical conviction. For Plato, pistis (the Greek root of the Latin fides and the French foi) is one of the modes of knowledge of the real. For Aristotle, it’s the persuasive force an orator exercises over an audience—a kind of conviction that lays the foundation for shared belief. So where does one place oneself among all these forms of “faith”? Between trust, belief, naivety, credulity, loyalty, assent, or disbelief, Corine Borgnet ends up losing her Latin—and no longer knows which saint to turn to. But that doesn’t make her a person without conscience or moral compass. She’s not without faith or law in the ethical sense.
Art then appears to her as a lifeline. And, as if by magic, we find ourselves back in the Bible, where the word salvation—and its semantic family, including savior—plays a central role. For a Christian, salvation is deliverance from sin and escape from damnation; it also means deliverance from misfortune, or the promise of freedom from bondage. For Corine Borgnet, art became salutary—a saving grace. Believing what she was told at art school as if it were gospel truth, the artist she was becoming set out in search of a “style,” because that was the dominant credo. But her artistic freedom—that was what truly mattered to her. Moving from mystical pursuit to the search for her own artistic identity, she shaped a personal visual language, refusing to be confined to a recognizable aesthetic. Over time, she developed a singular practice, defying both technical and aesthetic constraints, guided instead by her own personal mythologies and choosing whatever medium best suited their expression. Post-its, resin, chicken bones, butterflies, found objects, wax, charcoal, paint, sculpture, drawing, photography, video… the material doesn’t matter, nor the manner. The idea comes first—then comes the making, and the craft.
Between 2002 and 2012, she turned her attention to the world of labor: repetitive tasks, the dehumanization of employees through management culture, the urgency of relentless pace—seeking to inject thought into the business world through art. In parallel, from 2005 to 2015, she explored the fragile threshold between childhood and adulthood, through drawing and sculpture, portraying hybrid, ambiguous beings—both unsettling and strangely alluring. Cabinets of curiosities, vanitas, sex, love, and death—these heavy, timeless themes recur in her work, always treated with a humor that is anything but superficial. One could say she conveys them with a smile that’s both mischievous and biting.
Since 2015, her focus has shifted to the bourgeoisie. She dissects it, observes it, scrutinizes it. And that leads us to the particle—the noble-sounding “de” that denotes family lineage. Contrary to common belief, the presence of a particle doesn’t guarantee nobility—nor does its absence preclude it. And yet, in the curious way that prepositions can wield power, this tiny linguistic fragment is often treated as the very emblem of aristocracy. Borgnet, who bears no particle in her name and comes from a socially downwardly mobile family, casts an amused, iconoclastic eye on social and cultural codes. She disregards convention, gleefully shattering taboos. Through excessive use of patterns like toile de Jouy or houndstooth, she takes aim at the visual codes of a deeply identifiable social class: the aristocracy.
In this series, the titles leave little room for ambiguity: Bourgeoisie, Aristocratie, Omar m’a tuer, Nobilius Epheramus… The decorative motifs typical of traditional homes seem to swell, inflated perhaps by vanity. Vanity in both senses: the inflated self-importance of those who believe they descend from the gods—and the classic vanitas of art history, reminding us all of the brevity of life.
Isabelle de Maison Rouge Art historian, art critic and independent curator
November 2024
I don’t have a clue about what’s going on in her head. All I see are crackles, sparkles, turmoil, this storm-brewing under that skull, this eruption or heckle, gushing out in all directions...
I try to keep up. I try to plunge into this brain’s twists and turns, underneath this gorgeous hair so that I can understand, unravel this mysterious language and find out the direction / path from which the ideas came from and where this endless flow goes.
I wonder and listen, I hear confusing, scrambled sounds and humming noises, some operating pistons. Even if at first, I feel like I’m in a vortex that’s taking me into a whirling waltz and making me feel dizzy and slightly exhilarated, I finally find a common thread, an Arianne’s thread, guiding me throughout the maze...
Corine Borgnet builds her own personal mythology. Her work, either sculpted, drawn or filmed, is weaved out of her personal existence, which leads to the universal with a hint of a sparkling humor. Her loves, her friends, her troubles... her joys, her fears and her tears, a hunger for life and the spirit of a fighter... her blood rushes and outbursts of rage as well as the ones of love and of “I love you”... everything she experiences and feels influences her mindset and the shapes that emerge in her assemblages.
The esthetics she mindfully develops, all lead her choices in terms of materials, creating a real connection between her artworks and highlighting the issues that underlie them. From poultry bones and jesmonite to graphite on paper and 3D animations, from vanities to murdered plates and the last supper, all these objects remind me of the brevity of life, its inconsistency and inanity, and at the same time of its strength, which conquests and prevails over death. If Corine Borgnet’s memento mori may often be expressed using black humor, it actually becomes a Carpe Diem, a universally philosophical and optimistic adage. That’s how life goes, thoughts escape and I pursue their course.
The piece “Tower of Babel” (an ephemeral construction made out of used Post-It notes collected in NYC in 2001, right after 9/11 and the collapse of the towers) is a condensed version of the work to come, a visionary antidote to the fear of passing and erasing time, the transience of one’s existence, and the hope of a new commonly built-project.
A series of constants in the Corine Borgnet’s creative process can already be pointed out. First, the intervention of third-parties, volunteers, by collecting post-it notes, poultry carcasses and photos of children of artists (in the All we need is fucking love! series). Then, the common aspect and banality of the materials she uses. Finally, the general theme of how fragile and frivolous our destinies are, that she has been developing throughout her career is underlying her work from the beginning. Now that I’ve met her and identified myself, I start to follow her.
She takes me alongside with her and leads me wherever she pleases, down the tangled path of her obsessions. Our vulnerable lives, loves and even the planet, transformed into the lightness of a soap bubble. Like a child’s laughter. Nothing heavy, nothing pesky, as anything can fly away, blow up in smoke instantly, turn into dust, fall into nothingness, be swallowed up, disappear from our sight and memory.
All is left is a fleeting smile, caused by the irony and a feeling of confidence, permitted by the possibility of a second chance. Like a virtuoso, Corine Borgnet plays on the range of emotions and references, from the most refined and elegant ones (bustier, wedding dress, stiletto pumps), to spiritual elevations (the last supper, murdered plates, no man’s land, Eternal Loves) and the most trivial ones (stack of dishes, broken chair and faded doily, IUD or dildo). From Great culture to vernacular materials A moult, a Dodo, the chicken or the egg. This isn’t a chicken, I ate the last Dodo. Is art as dead as this ? The works titles do not disagree. The trend is underlined in the Xvotos, where the party truly ends, despite the strong desire to en”dure”, in reference to “Dürer’s” drawings. And even if the artist hints in the title of her Amours Eternelles (Everlasting loves) series, it clearly appears that she doesn’t believe in the stillness of feelings. Just as the garter and the wedding dress are intended to be worn only once, the Vanity shoe embodies as The Ultimate, with the last dance, just like the last supper.
In the heuristics, self-reflexions of her work, Corine Borgnet expresses the fear of the unknown of the afterlife, as well as the vanity of one’s desire to leave a trace at all costs.
With “Epitaphe toi-même” (Epitath yourself), a plaque of white marble as we can see in our cemeteries, and marked with this twisted and brief inscription, using Sacha Guitry- like black humor, she reminds me - including herself in the lot, of the fatal outcome of every living and finds the final words while being playful and mischievous, with this pirouette, she declares her love to life.
Kiss me! Kiss me again!
Life's a bitch! The thought crosses your mind, when observing Corine Borgnet's work in her studio. It may sound like a complaint, a protest against the unbearable weight of the world and our existence, or on the contrary, like the sardonic burst of an endless resistance against the inevitable: around us, near or far away, there is certainly some darkness and some despair and yet, these sculptures and these drawings feel like a jolt or a nose-thumbing.
Death, where lies your victory! I look straight at you, in the white of your absent (enucleate) eyes and I laugh at your face. Oh, my laugh isn't light, it isn't carefree, but it's a laugh. And if my humor is black, it's not a sour laugh: it doesn't deprive of my strength to fight against hollowness, mediocrity, cowardness, ugliness. On the contrary, it stands up to fight even more, even if only for fifteen minutes - and it will already be a victory, and we'll see afterwards how to fight for the next other fifteen minutes, and others will join the battle -, the time to give in, the time not to love anymore, not to share, not to "sow flowers" in the nostrils of the Reaper, like used to sing this soldier of derisive and wild poetry, Georges Brassens.
Guess what: that's what artworks are for, supposing we could speak of a purpose. Art works are a revolt against death and Corine Like Mohammed Al Swinging around the tank Ceorge Frazter Who promised himeli he would smash him with at his weight and power. The wasp takes over the Caterpillar! Until the last breath...
Sometimes, life knocks you down with nasty punches, Corine Borgnet knows that. She knows, but neither in her head nor her guts do these haymakers stop the outburst, the desire, the creative thrust. On the opposite, she holds in her heart and soul so much more than an algorithm - this pitiful copy-paste machine to serve you to your heart's content, until it feels sick, that you're supposed to expect. With her, it's rather the agitation, the vital broth from which came out the unexpected from the living, ailing today, but maybe not forever, if we let ourselves in the grasp of what already moved Jérôme Bosch, Bruegel the Elder, Rabelais, Cervantes or Rimbaud, or closer to us, Bohumil Hrabal, Philippe Roth or Salman Rushdie. They call it the "lust for life" or rather
"rage de vivre" in French, if I allow myself to borrow the title of the French edition of the book by Mezz Mezzrow (1). Quite a man this jazz saxophone player born in 1899 from Russian Jewish parents that moved to the U.S: he declared himself "voluntary negro" (and was identified as such in his military papers), and demanded in 1940, when convicted in the segregate prison of Rikers Island in New York for two years (after being caught in possession of a few pot joints), to be placed in the black sector! To make it short, let's just say that the same "fury" inhabits Picasso - who is also very "unsuitable"- Van Gogh, Malevitch, Kandinsky, Soutine, Matisse, Bacon, Hartung, Maryan, Joan Mitchell, Annette Messager, Esther Ferrer, Georgia O'Keeffe, to quote only these few, and so many more, with their own gradient and style. Damn life! Goddamn artists!
The Hebraic Bible holds this quite strange expression that translators twist the literal meaning, most likely to avoid any trouble with religious readers. It was found for the first time in the Book of Genesis, when Noah and his family enter the Ark, right before the Flood sink the earth and all the living that inhabit it!
You can read precisely:in the French version Dans l'os de ce jour Noé vient, et Sem et Cham et Japhet fils de Noé ; et la femme de Noé et les trois femmes de ses fils, avec eux vers l'arche
"On that very day (in French, "Dans l'os de ce jour" or literally in English "in the bone of that day"), Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark". On that very day, indeed, there is a "bone", not a fish bone stuck in one's throat, but a bone that stands out as a vital breaking point with everything that preexists to save Life, because Life, at this moment, in the story that's being told, is off to a bad start: a catastrophe is coming on as humar kind sits around and does nothing, being only power-driven.
Any similarity between this mythical tale and actual people or events is purely coincidental, as they say. Isn't it?
The expression can also be found in other writings in the Torah, when Abraham is circumcised with every other male in his clan, which makes a turning point of the story. To mark the moment when Israel's sons get out of enslavement. To emphasize the breaking-free that Shabbat operates over the course of our daily lives. Also to distinguish the day when Moses dies and doesn't go to the Promised Land, but sees it, so he knows that his life wasn't in vain, that history goes on and that the sources of life didn't dry up in the desert.
"That day's bone" or "l'os de ce jour" in French, or the days when there is a bone. Not to break our nose, but to mark a passing, a beyond, a space opened to a future.
That's the meaning of the old vanities' tradition, standing at the core of Corine Borgnet's work. Not to overburden ourselves with the idea that we are caged in finitude and rotting already - what a gloomy fortune to "be-towards-death" like Heidegger sadly said.
But, on the contrary, to foil our destiny and move forward, like Corine Borgnet did with her "Vanity Shoes" in 2017. She didn't plan everything. She indulged herself into her dashing but considered idea - because her skull if full of them, whatever she might say and even if her work doesn't come with (thank God) abstruse and never-ending labels -, and put out all of her art - remember that art (tekné in ancient Greek) is before all a crafted skill, a high quality production that influences the sense that an artwork holds. And it did work. And this was the idea: that it would work, that this pile of bones elegantly laid out would not be at a standstill, but in graceful motion.
What could be said about her wedding dress entitled "Eternal love", except that she could have dedicated it to Heloise, whose bones, like Jean Teulé frantically told with delight, shook when those of Abélard joined them. Humor as always, to laugh at the burdening impedimenta, which death only constitutes the last avatar.
Yes, Corine Borgnet's work can seem a bit dark... Maybe she has in her blood some Prague gene, between the Vlatva and the Wenceslas Square, in Kafka's shadow, where death is willingly laughed at in despair, taken seriously enough to dance with it, as they know that dance is what matters.
Corine Borgnet plays the violin with that bone, with that sometimes bad-looking life - but having in mind that where something looks bad, that thing leaves a lot to be desired so that we can still find a small space that's both poetic and ironic.
On her often big-sized "Murdered Dishes", she meticulously painted Toile de Jouy patterns - a fabric originally used by the aristocracy and then by the polished bourgeoisie to cover the walls of their pretty houses - and she punched the dishes with the greatest care accordingly to the old Maya tradition that she discovered watching the Arte channel. A breach is thus made to breathe, so that the soul escapes and doesn't get trapped in the bare reality of things or social connections...
So if in life, there is "a bone", Corine Borgnet deals with it. With that discomfort, that unquietness, even the requirement to keep track of the fact that, in life, sometimes, some things clash and hurt, but often, if taken with a sense of derision - which is not a withdrawal- with the courage of a desperate laugh, then, these things can break the routine and fatality, because they become like a foot in the doorway to avoid its forever closing on resignation and hollowness, on the extinction of meaning.
It's humble, not very political, in a sense that some believe in protest works that bear messages though quickly wilted to be honest, but in a capacity of deviation, of mystery and of questioning that doesn't drain as soon as circumstances or trends change.
Maybe that's it, the magic spell of the only worthy "aristocracy". The true distinction: it cleverly "doesn't doesn't show off"!
But let's get back again to the "bone of the day", as it holds a few hidden reinterpretations, if we consider it in its original language, Hebrew. The word "ètsem", "bone", has the same numeric value as the verb "qof-yod-tsadé" that means "to wake up".
In other words, in the bone of the day is an awakening, an arising, the possibility of a new day to live... That's precisely what this is about, from one part to another of Corine Borgnet's work, from her "Tower of Babel" made with used post-it notes that she collected, to her "Royal bouquet", not to forget the "Extraordinary story of a Skin-rack" that relates the unlikely, rebellious story of an uncategorized work of art.
In addition, the word is made of three letters, ayin-tsadé-mem, that gives the verb be strong. In others words, the bone, the bones, the skeleton are not to be considered as what's left when life has passed, but as the structure bearing the living flesh, otherwise there is no spirit, whatever the lA interactive robots may be able to say. By turning poultry bones into girdles, shoes, masks, dresses, in other words a refined decoration, Corine Borgnet celebrates, in absence, the grandeur of the epitomized bodies.
Your body, why not?
As a conclusion, the very root of the word, in two letters, ayin-stadé, 'èts, is the tree. Understand the driving force of life itself: in the middle of the Garden of Eden grows 'èts hahayyim, the Tree of Life and even "lives", because they are countless and all different and the "living beings", infinitely numerous but all so unique. In the "bone" of that day, the Tree works, constantly cracking up the pre-established images to open new perspectives for its viewer. That's precisely the point of any true art: to make visible what was unnoticed up until now.
So, the Last Supper is appreciated under another angle than what's left after the Grim Reaper, the ultimate hint of a tragedy that the guests of the worldwide feast couldn't prevent, the last vestige of the Big Sleep lying in wait for us without any hope of a Charming Prince to wake us up. The work is not much of a free warning before the big fall, it's rather a cheeky jolt from an artist that looks death in the eye and recycles it in art, to whisper to the ear of Life, in the manner of Gabin: "You have beautiful eyes, do you know that?". She does it in a mischievous smile because she knows better, because she knows that Life, it still has and will always have something to say to us, like Michèle Morgan would say: "Kiss me, kiss me again!".
Jean Francois Buthors, columnist, journalist, writer
'Published in 1946 in the United-States, untitled "Really the Blues" and prefaced by Henri Miller, no less!
The french edition was published in 1950, by Corréa, within a collection directed by the wonderful editor Maurice Nadeau.
2 Jean Teulé, Héloïse, ouille!, Paris, Julliard, 2015.
Small Talks
Interview between Corine Borgnet and Stéphanie Pioda
How did you come up with the exhibition?
Have you ever been to Le Suquet?
No. Then, it’s important. Le Suquet was formerly the City of Cannes’ morgue, a windowless building with a basement. The two vaulted rooms are where the bodies were placed, and there are two metal ventilation pipes running along the ceiling, which gives it a somewhat industrial feel. It’s a theme that can’t be ignored.
Does this set the right tone and atmosphere?
Generally speaking, the exhibition is not very funny. The first work that visitors encounter is Épitaphe toi même [Epitaph myself!] and my son has created a suitably dramatic soundtrack. I present all mediums and several series, not necessarily all of them as there are only around fifty pieces.
Essentially, they express my views and my questions about the concepts of fragility and resilience. I often give materials a second chance, whether used Post-it notes that have been scribbled on and recovered from doors at the UN and Columbia University, bearing the marks of human hands, and I even used discarded chicken carcasses. To begin with, they were really just leftovers from a shared meal. I show what we leave behind.
Are you fascinated by the archetypes of art history and the emotions that have shaped humanity since the beginning of time, such as love, faith, betrayal, and war?
I don’t talk too much about war, more about love. I once covered a tank with a houndstooth fabric, but I didn’t go any further because I feel that war automatically brings me back to current events. I can only deal with it realistically with tanks and bombs, or I would have to project myself into the future with RoboCops, but that is not my language, as I am more interested in objects with symbolic meaning. I prefer open, universal subjects with a timeless dimension. That’s what I’m expressing with Le dernier souper [The Last Supper]. We don’t know if these are the leftovers from a dinner that took place the day before or were discovered during archaeological excavations several years later. Humanity will have disappeared and this will be a witness to the Anthropocene. Only insects will live on because Earth can manage without us!
Everything’s just vanity!
I approach the theme of vanity in its literal sense: Remind yourself that you are mortal but enjoy life! I remind people that it is better to love yourself because we are all destined to die anyway! It’s just a reality check. I don’t believe in wealth or titles, perhaps more in a certain intellectual capacity, but otherwise I treat everyone the same because we all end up in the same place! I had a Catholic upbringing and I followed catechism class where I drew pictures. I would have liked to believe, but I never did. When I talk about religion, it’s like a lifeline that you can’t really use. I focus on the human conscience, on our status as human beings, and that there is no answer other than the here and now. And there’s love!
Can you give us an overview of the exhibition at Le Suquet?
Indeed, we start with the theme of «Eternal loves», where we find my exhibits in bone - a dress, a tiara, a garter, a shoe, a branch on the wall... - my illustrations with the dodo (Make your dream come true) and Le cri, the installation Le dernier souper and my new painted plate Forgotten Beauty. The second room, 'Sans foi ni particule' [Without Faith or Form] is the period of houndstooth and Toile de Jouy. The hallway is lined with Post-it notes and leads to two vaulted rooms. On one side, No Man's Land, where a video is projected featuring a heart and barbed wire, and on the other, «Escape Game» with some new works. Between the two, in the small space, you pass between two frescoes of a naked and fragmented man and woman, like in Marina Abramovié's performance Imponderabilia. I'm going to give very little importance to humans, we're going to bypass them!
Are you opening a new chapter with «Escape Game»?
I look for solutions and since religion isn't working, nor is love or work, then I'm heading into space! The room is orange from floor to ceiling, including the carpet, to match that of Mars. It's like being in a space capsule with an image of the planet Mars on a plate 1.20 metres in diameter on one side and a greyish image of the Moon on a plate 1.40 metres in diameter on the other. An installation entitled I will remember the Future, a reference to the last sentence of Philip K. Dick's autobiography, is located between the two. On a 12-metre-long beam are placed severed animal legs that go in one direction or the other, as if a nuclear explosion had wiped everything out and only the legs remain! We can each imagine the body that would have been attached to them.
Initially, I wanted to focus on endangered African wildlife, but an elephant's foot is too big for a board measuring 30 cm wide! So I switched to animals from our continent, such as wolves, goats, lynxes and brown bears.
When you say that the legs go in two directions, it makes me think of hieroglyphs where the direction of reading a text is determined by the direction in which the animals are looking.
If you like. They're moving in a silent march with the moon or towards Mars over a 12-metre distance.
They're in motion, not frozen, just caught in their stride.
So, despite the disaster, you're saving us with beauty?
That's right, but it's not universal beauty; not everyone will like it.
What's the final scene?
«Let's not take ourselves too seriously; there won't be any survivors.» That's the Alphonse Allais quote I use everywhere. Véronique Godé joked that by the end of the exhibition, we might as well jump into the water
- but no way! We won't take ourselves too seriously; let's just go for a drink!
Unfolding eternity / Marion Zilio, 2017
Corine Borgnet pushes worlds to the point of rupture—until boredom reveals a tear, a breach that gestures toward the night, insomnia, idleness… in other words, a longing for something else.
These worlds are imaginary projections into self-contained, identifiable universes. There is the world of labor, which stirs individuals under a regulatory order—its precarious balance evoked through the image of the Tower of Babel. Then there is childhood, myth, and fairy tales. And in between, those liminal spaces suggested by her cabinets of curiosity and forms bound with compression bandages, as if what binds could also liberate.
Layered worlds begin to take shape: from the bureaucratic life rooted in the earth, where Post-it notes become vessels of a mechanical or toilsome memory, to the hinterlands of myth and childhood dreams, where everything is still “to be envisioned”—yet the absence of heads seems to imply the opposite; to the inter-worlds suspended between unresolved states, beyond the stratified forms of language and fixed representations.
Though her methods and subjects are ever-shifting, a shared undercurrent runs through these diverse realms—a crossing of existential unease, threading and tracing a melancholy that returns from outside. A thread both narrative and formal, activated by the logic of patterns like a haunting refrain.
Toile de Jouy, while identifying bourgeois interiors, also conceals the decay of crumbling walls—like kitsch, which Kundera described as a veil of modesty thrown over the filth of the world. Both elegant and vulgar, houndstooth serves as the launchpad for real fictions. The motif lifts off the surface, becomes a false armor, a mesh of protection—rising against the resin cast of an actual chicken foot, which becomes material and soon a shoe enveloping an absent foot.
This is not a return of the repressed, as with her inter-world, inter-age, inter-gender children who evoke a sense of uncanny strangeness. Rather, it is a return from outside any psychic instance—a real that cannot be reached, resurfacing unnoticed in boredom and absurdity, as in her videos that film “14 seconds of nothing.”
Perhaps it is the mark of an obsessive gesture, driven by an innocent desire to circle around things, to unfold—like Sisyphus, endlessly and in vain—an “eternity of everything.”
— Marion Zilio
East Village Journal, From a Clutter of Post-It Notes, Confusion Art
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: February 10, 2002
The sign appeared months ago in a storefront window on East Fifth Street, just west of Second Avenue. It asked for a special favor—and judging by the abundance of capital letters and underlining, it seemed quite urgent.
"Neighbors!" it read. "I need to collect your used Post-Its. Notes, doodles, all sizes, all colors." A hand-drawn arrow curled toward a mail slot at the bottom of a blue door.
On many late nights, artist Corine Borgnet could be seen through a window behind that door, sorting feverishly through the hundreds of old notes that, against all odds, her East Village neighbors had slipped through the slot.
“Take the L to Bedford,” read one. “Tom, your shrink called,” said another. The notes came in all types of handwriting and with every kind of message. Some featured only stick figures, others drawings of a cat named Charlotte.
Two and a half months—and roughly 6,000 Post-it notes—later, a work of art was born. Borgnet used the random communiqués to create a contemporary Tower of Babel (or babble), built around the themes of confusion and information overload. The piece, part of an exhibition titled Messages, is priced at $11,000 and on display through March 8 at Buell Hall at Columbia University.
“I’m working with confusion because it’s a personal theme for me,” said Borgnet, 39. As she calmly installed the work the day before the opening—her first solo show—she showed no sign of nerves. Stylish even in studio mode, she wore a neon green shirt that matched her vibrant chartreuse glasses. Still, she insisted: “I’m a very confused artist. That’s why I wanted to work on confusion.”
She explained that visually combining the notes created a “remarkable matrix of confusion,” which sparked the idea of the tower. She built a foam base and layered the Post-its around it.
But unlike the biblical Tower of Babel, this one was never meant to reach heaven—just 14 feet into the air. In the Book of Genesis, the ancient Babylonians tried to build a tower to reach God. Offended by their hubris, God scrambled their languages so they could no longer understand one another.
“The inspiration was the whole cacophony of voices,” said George Robinson, founder and director of NurtureArt, a nonprofit arts organization, and curator of the exhibition.
Robinson and Borgnet originally envisioned Messages as a project for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views program, on the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. Their proposal—dated September 5—was never accepted. A week later, the towers fell.
“I was working with this idea of a grand tower and all the parallels with the myth of Babel—the coming together of so many languages and people,” said Borgnet, who was born on a small fishing island off the coast of France. “But my tower became the opposite of the biblical story. It’s inclusive. It fostered communication. Neighbors who’d never spoken to me before started asking what I was doing with all these notes.”
She also collected Post-Its from Columbia’s campus and from the streets. “You know the kind—fallen off a door that says, ‘Back in 5 minutes.’” On Fifth Street, she became known as the Post-It woman.
Her fascination with those little sticky squares dates back to her first jobs in New York, ten years earlier. She dreamed of being an artist, but ended up working as a secretary—with nothing to draw on except the Post-its at her desk. One of her other works in the Columbia show, The Babblers, is a collection of 600 miniature Post-it portraits.
Borgnet encourages visitors to the gallery to bring their own used notes and stick them on the tower. She rustles the loose ends of the Post-its like feathers and explains, “I want it to be very, very fluffy.” She smiles and adds, “Fluffy and crazy.”
Photo: Corine Borgnet, in front of her Post-it note tower before the opening of Messages at Columbia’s Buell Hall. She collected around 6,000 sticky notes. (Edward Keating/The New York Times)
Correction (Feb. 20, 2002): The Feb. 10 article about Corine Borgnet, who creates art from used Post-it notes, misspelled the name of the nonprofit organization founded and directed by George Robinson, curator of the exhibition at Columbia University. The correct name is NurtureArt, not Nutureart.
— Susan Saulny
The Extraordinary Story of a Skin-Bearer
Preface by Marie Deparis-Yafil, 2015
Within Corine Borgnet’s body of work, The Skin-Bearer (Le Porte-peau) holds a singular place—resisting categorization, defying affiliation. And yet, by the artist’s own admission, it is perhaps one of the most powerful pieces she has created—born not of careful deliberation, but from an instinctive creative surge, supported, of course, by her mastery of sculptural technique.
This particularly striking work captivated everyone who encountered it, from Beyond My Dreams at Galerie Mondapart in Boulogne-Billancourt in 2012 to Au-delà de mes rêves at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Bourg-en-Bresse in 2013. The story of The Skin-Bearer—its birth and its end—has since become a tale of twists and turns, a novel, an epic, tragic in tone.
But The Skin-Bearer is no Phoenix: it never rose again in the form it once had, reborn from its ashes. It is not so much about resurrection as it is the destiny of a work that is, in Borgnet’s words, bigger than life—a “hyper-work,” an exceptional creation that might seem to spring from ancient hubris.
If The Skin-Bearer is excessive, it’s not because of its scale—which remains modest—but due to its very essence and the sense of awe it provokes. In challenging the ordinary fate of an “acceptable” work of art, didn’t its creator—perhaps unknowingly—take the risk of its destruction?
Borgnet, long fascinated by myths and legends, may have unwittingly provoked the wrath of Nemesis with this iconoclastic piece. For, to borrow the words of old Herodotus: “The heavens always bring low that which exceeds the measure.” In this light, The Skin-Bearer might be seen—like Icarus or Lucifer—as a fallen manifestation of art’s power, too defiant to remain alive with impunity.
But beyond any symbolic reading of the work’s fate, two parallel truths emerge: the persistence of the piece through its many metamorphoses (from sculpture to ritual object, to relic—constructed, destroyed, and rebuilt), and the resilience the artist displays—and must display.
Right up to the final destruction of The Skin-Bearer, it is Corine Borgnet who endures, refusing to let her work be erased. She transforms its annihilation into a final act of creation.
Like a demiurge, she remains bound to the destiny of her Skin-Bearer, even in the face of an insurance company that sought to reduce it to a mere object—subject to classification and elimination. In doing so, she confirms Walter Benjamin’s haunting prediction of the artwork’s fading aura in the age of mechanical reproduction.*
The story of The Skin-Bearer—its life and its death—raises an enduring and complex question: what is the status of a work of art? Especially in contemporary art, where the idea of the artwork as process often supersedes its existence as a fixed object or product. A “product” that may, in the end, be reduced to ruins—crumbs in a baroquely ornamented jar in the corner of a studio. But perhaps that doesn’t matter—so long as the work exists, from its inception to its destruction, as a creative and intellectual process, rather than a specific material thing.
This may be easier to accept with a ready-made—Duchamp famously said, “The replica of a ready-made delivers the same message.” But it’s less obvious with an object as singular as The Skin-Bearer.
After all, there is an important ontological and political distinction between a work destroyed by a third-party vandal, and a work destroyed by the artist herself. One need only recall the dual experience of Jean-Pierre Raynaud: in 1993, he demolished his own iconic piece La Maison (1969) on camera, but in 2015, became the victim of the forced liquidation of his public work Dialogue with History (1987) by the city of Quebec.
Perhaps, then, the destruction happening staged by Corine Borgnet in her studio—a performance also documented on video and later exhibited as a relic**—raises unresolved questions around the sacralization and fetishization of the artwork, and whether it must be preserved in its material state.
In my view, the sacrificial dimension of its destruction—carried out by the artist herself, or at least orchestrated by her—echoes the spirit of Dadaist gestures (think of Man Ray’s Objects to be Destroyed). It reaffirms, above all, a fierce determination to make the work exist—as an absolute, living force. And this, I believe, lies at the very heart of Corine Borgnet’s artistic vision.
* Cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” final version 1939, in Œuvres III, Gallimard, Paris, 2000.
** Rites de passage, curated by artist Sandrine Elberg, Plateforme, Paris, March 2015.
— Marie Deparis-Yafil
To Us Others...
Isabelle de Maison Rouge
Catalogue text for the exhibition "Hybride 3", 2015
A large wall filled with around forty charcoal portraits of children.
Around each of them swirl and slide soft, pink forms—metaphors for life, creative force, viral energy—adding a burlesque touch.
Who are these kids? What connects them? The childhood of art!
Can we, by looking at their cherubic faces, begin to imagine their destiny?
Is it possible to detect a future artistic calling—something that germinates in childhood and reveals itself in maturity as a singular path?
Is it already there, in those fresh eyes observing the world for the first time?
Can we read in their features a sense of predestination, a role written in advance?
What is the nature of artistic vocation?
What makes it different—what marks the uniqueness of each future creator?
These images prompt reflection on the great family of art.
Beside them, against the wall, a video screen plays a continuous scroll: a litany of names—artists living and dead, famous or obscure, from every corner of the world.
A list of surnames, equal and undifferentiated, like on a cenotaph.
And the artist’s ego in all this?
A list—like an epitaph—that disrupts hierarchies and brings everything down to the same level...
— Isabelle de Maison Rouge
All we need is fucking love, Hanibal Srouji, 2015
In this exhibition, Corine Borgnet presents a work dedicated to childhood photographs of artists—constructing a Memorial of One Hundred Faces.
Always in a state of perpetual metamorphosis, the strength of Corine Borgnet’s work lies in her ability to bring the Other into presence through her own omnipresent self. This allows her to explore the relationship to the body—the body of the Other transformed by the self of the artist.
Her practice revolves around questions of identity—physical identity, which transforms with age, and the ways in which we are inevitably compelled to redefine ourselves in response to that transformation.
The body is central. She examines it, observes it, interrogates it. It is also through the body that she constructs her relationship to the Other. In truth, it is always alterity that is at stake in her work: defining oneself through one’s relationship to the Other. This notion runs as a guiding thread through her entire universe.
The choice to focus on portraits of artists seems a natural one. As Corine Borgnet herself puts it:
“... since we use the same visual language to express ourselves... what barriers could there be? The only one between the Other and me is the skin—that which defines us as individuals and, at the same time, separates us.”
Among these portraits, some remain true to the original image, others stray from it. The series is composed in a palette ranging from shades of gray to the white of the paper, with nuances of pink—a color evoking the skin, so particular to each of us. This dermis, which the artist sets out to open, to transform, ultimately envelops the portraits and becomes an omnipresent element in the works.
Finding a resemblance between the old photograph—the artist as a young child—and their present self is essential... This metamorphosis of the face, the face of the artist-in-the-making, must preserve traces, so that Corine can transmit expression... to know, to recognize...
In 2001, with her installation The Tower of Babel, Corine Borgnet reconstructed the legendary tower by collecting Post-it notes written in as many languages as possible. These personal, disposable messages—written by one person for another—became the building blocks of a new Babel. To create that piece, Borgnet had to read and sort through messages not meant for her—notes, thoughts, fragments of other people’s lives—which became the raw material of her construction. She recycled already-used, discarded parts of others’ daily lives into a living, speaking artwork.
In that same spirit, Corine Borgnet now builds a Memorial bringing together artists of all nationalities. Once again, it is about others—understanding them, exploring them in a sense—not with violence, but with great care. In a way, Corine works to bring them closer, to seek out that alterity—“the quality of being other”—or the recognition of the Other in all their difference.
— Hanibal Srouji
Toile de Jouy: Contemporary Perspectives — On the Campus
Isabelle de Maison Rouge, 2015
The Story of Toile de Jouy Is Woven Through Both Economy and Art
Isabelle de Maison Rouge
Catalogue text for the exhibition “Regards Contemporains sur la Toile de Jouy,” HEC Contemporary Art Space, Jouy-en-Josas, 2015
The story of toile de Jouy is as deeply rooted in economics as it is in aesthetics—an intimate relationship that fully justifies the presence of these “contemporary perspectives” from a group of twenty artists at the Contemporary Art Space on the HEC campus in Jouy-en-Josas.
Thanks to advances in navigation, 17th-century France saw a boom in trade and the import of both materials and techniques from abroad. Fashion turned toward the vibrant “Indiennes”—printed cotton fabrics from India, created through woodblock printing, offering elegant, varied designs that quickly appealed to French tastes. Yet, in 1686, these cotton prints were banned in France, and with them, the technical know-how was lost.
When the ban was lifted in 1759, German-born engraver and colorist Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf—descended from a Lutheran family of dyers—settled in Jouy-en-Josas, a site chosen for its “pure water and fertile land.” There, he founded the famous textile factory that would become synonymous with toile de Jouy, making the town a household name. By 1783, the enterprise was granted royal status, and by 1806, at its height under the Empire, it had become France’s third-largest industrial operation.
In thirty years, Oberkampf—an astute entrepreneur—multiplied his initial investment by 20,000. From the start, the venture was internationally oriented and managed with bold energy, generating major profits. Oberkampf gathered around him artists, designers, engravers, printers, and colorists to develop those iconic pastoral and floral motifs—rendered in delicate monochromes—depicting humans and animals in scenic landscapes. These patterns would make toile de Jouy a benchmark of refinement in furniture, fashion, and home décor.
From the beginning, the clientele was elite: nobles and prominent figures were charmed by the elegance and variety of the designs. Oberkampf was ennobled in 1787 by Louis XVI. Later, during a visit to the factory, Napoleon was so impressed by the dynamic entrepreneur that he removed the Legion of Honor from his own lapel and pinned it to Oberkampf, declaring: “No one is more worthy to wear it than you.” Under his direction, more than 30,000 designs were created.
The dialogue between cultures is the foundation of toile de Jouy’s originality and renown. Oberkampf himself—a true European ahead of his time—was a pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, a forward-thinking business strategist, and an employer committed to both innovation and social progress. His textile company became the largest printed fabric manufacturer in Europe, employing 1,237 workers before the collapse of the Empire led to its closure.
The HEC Contemporary Art Space invited artists—most of whom had never worked with toile de Jouy—to propose new interpretations for the occasion, highlighting the political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of this heritage. Techniques such as crochet, embroidery, painting, silkscreen, photography, video, sculpture, molding, imprinting, drawing, writing, and installation, combined with materials ranging from wood, concrete, plaster, fabric, and paper to resin and plastic, reflect the diversity of contemporary artistic practice.
Each artist was given carte blanche. Each, in their own way, extracted the essence—the DNA—of the Jouy manufacture. Some focused on process and production methods; others explored the motifs and their layered meanings, or the figure of the maker, individual or collective. Some reflected on the intersection of history and economy; others approached the language of the manufacture itself, playing with its vocabulary.
This exhibition invites us, through the lens of contemporary art, to look anew at the history of a fabric deeply interwoven with the story of East–West relations—between fascination and colonization—and at the legacy of an industry emblematic of the Industrial Revolution and today’s global transformations.
Below are several themes that served as starting points for the artists' research and may serve as pathways for visitors to engage with the exhibition:
— Motifs
Toile de Jouy is globally renowned for its repeating scenic patterns—pastoral imagery, arabesques of flora, and symmetrical compositions evoking the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry and anchoring the textile in a specifically French tradition. Many of these bucolic scenes were designed by Jean-Baptiste Huet for the Jouy factory, blending romance and leisure in gardens meant for strolls or dreamy siestas.
Yet some prints depicted major historical events—like the French Revolution—revealing that beneath the sweetness of their aesthetic lies the potential for subversion. Reinterpreted by today’s artists, those once-innocent motifs may take on a more critical, provocative tone.
— Color
Beyond the imagery, color played a crucial role in the popularity of toile de Jouy. Originally, the printing process used mordants (iron or aluminum salts) rather than pigments directly. The fabric was then soaked in cow dung to remove excess thickener, washed, and dyed with madder root to reveal the red-to-pink color range, with tones from deep red to lilac, bistre, and black. The pale pink base often faded in the sun as the fabric dried on the factory lawns.
Blue and yellow were printed directly; green was achieved by layering yellow and blue until 1808. Today, color palettes have expanded wildly—even to neon hues—attracting the curiosity of the participating artists.
— Bourgeois Taste
Toile de Jouy embodies a vision of nature reminiscent of Marie Antoinette frolicking with lambs at the Petit Trianon: ladies with parasols mingling with peasants in an idealized countryside. These dainty images, rendered in subtle tonalities, were quickly embraced by aristocrats as luxury furnishings—curtains, wall panels, bedding, folding screens, lampshades.
After the Revolution, the bourgeoisie embraced them just as eagerly. By the 1960s, toile-inspired wallpaper—pink for girls, green or blue for boys—became standard in middle-class French homes. More recently, designers like Castelbajac and Gaultier, and luxury brands like Hermès, Lesage, Repetto, Pierre Frey, and Maison Braquenié, have incorporated toile into their collections. This nostalgic echo sparked a more anthropological investigation by the artists, interrogating the petit-bourgeois ideals that toile de Jouy has come to represent.
— The Entrepreneurial Adventure
There is a real fascination with Oberkampf’s story—a German craftsman who became one of the greatest industrial entrepreneurs of his time. Etymologically, a manufacture is a place where work is done by hand, as opposed to capitalist factories driven by machines and productivity. Yet unlike the artisanal workshops of the feudal era, manufactures were large, often employing hundreds, and could be state-run or privately funded.
Oberkampf was both a paternalistic employer and a savvy capitalist. He married a French bourgeois and became the first mayor of Jouy-en-Josas in 1790. Ever innovative, he adopted copperplate and roller printing, developed new dyes with his nephew (like a stable green), collaborated with chemists like Gay-Lussac and Berthollet on chlorine bleaching, and even sent family members on industrial espionage missions to England.
This industrial saga invites deeper reflection on the global economy, the economics of art and luxury, and the artist's place within it—all bound up in questions of labor and production.
— A Cross-Cultural Approach
Born from an international exchange of ideas and methods, toile de Jouy often depicted idealized Edens—harmonious scenes uniting flora, fauna, and humans. Oriental flowers from India and Persia mingled with European botanicals. Themes like the four seasons, agriculture, hunting, and fishing abounded, alongside imagined structures—pagodas, tents, temples—drawn from four continents and various religions, offering paths of meditation and philosophical reflection.
These artificial paradises reconciled opposites, erasing conflict, and merging worlds. In this perfect vision, the artists saw the political beneath the idyllic. They forged links between popular and high culture, between craft and fine art, between cliché and visual narrative—questioning societal values, blurring identities, playing with stereotypes, and opening a space for dialogue and critique.
The Cure, Michel Arouim , 2013
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlighted the link between the mental dispositions that fuel totalitarian violence and the binary logic inherent to modern technology—a phenomenon she foresaw would rise sharply.
Despite their apparent benefits, do these technologies encourage not just the extermination of bodies, but also of the mind? Corine Borgnet, in her exhibition The Cure, opening September 6, 2013 at Galerie Talmart, at least asks that question.
Her vision focuses on our dependence on such technologies—the absorption of our minds and our will (and, by extension, our identities) into electronic means of communication and information. The works gathered here form a fragmented metaphor, where photographic images, sculpture, and a fifteen-minute live performance together reframe this enigma within the realm of pure art. Even though virtual forms of contemporary art aren’t directly represented in the exhibition, they remain within the scope of its critical commentary.
This dependence is first embodied in a mannequin’s severed head, presented among other objects in Talmart’s display window. Sprouting from its neck is a bundle of electrical cables—charging cords, data lines—each ending in a plug, visualizing the idea of entanglement and dependency.
At the center of the main gallery, two praying figures face each other on a black-and-white checkerboard floor. A headless male figure extends one arm, which transforms into a thick, cable-like appendage. Opposite him stands a female figure, marked by strange tattoos partially obscured by a veil of black paint. The tension between genders, the contrast between light and dark zones, and the floral arabesques covering the woman’s body—all echo a theme of binary opposition, further accentuated by email references (some scribbled on yellow paper squares discarded in plastic bins nearby).
The man’s body is also covered in tattoos—disjointed or meaningless words, often crossed out—expressing a kind of linguistic decay, a drying-up of communication. This deterioration is mirrored, in more abstract form, by the contradictions found in the painted decor of the female figure—yet another, more subtle image of binarity than the stark checkerboard.
The piece is surrounded by “paintings” hung on the walls—photographs of naked bodies painted a pale yellow, contrasting eerily with the gray, sordid, or nonexistent backdrops. Their ghostly appearance is intensified by the matching yellow hoods that conceal their hair. One can’t help but think of concentration camps—or their fictional echoes in dystopian cinema—where the mere sight of piled-up bodies serves as a warning against the cult of sameness.
These bodies also bear tattoos—vague inscriptions resembling scars—similar in meaning to those on the praying figures. Even though direct representations of digital systems are absent from these hyperrealistic images, their ghost presence lingers: unused wall outlets, for instance. Rather than portraying the origins of technology, these images suggest its endgame: a point where the extinction of the spirit is indistinguishable from that of the body. The sameness of these figures—stripped of sexual distinction, painted yellow like a sinister star—evokes a tattoo, or a scar, tied to another, more explicit kind of totalitarianism.
Borgnet’s decision to work with the rawest, most “gritty” materials is a critique aimed at the most disembodied forms of contemporary art—particularly those rooted in virtuality. And yet, there is nothing nostalgic or regressive in her approach. Her visual language embraces the fundamentals of harmony—reflected in the checkerboard motif, or in the contrast between gray and yellow. Borgnet, well-versed in the works of Kandinsky, Vermeer, and other great painters she’s written about, continues their exploration of the connection between form and violence. If the sacred has vanished from her horizon, it has been replaced by the sacrificial—which in today’s world obstructs our metaphysical grasp of art’s meaning. Contemporary art’s obsession with surface—what is visible and legible—attests to this disconnection, which may be tragic.
But one doesn’t shed the sacred so easily. The aesthetic of the sculpted orants calls to mind certain strands of contemporary Japanese art, where metaphysical principles still linger—even when sanctifying manga. Could the male and female orants represent Yin and Yang? Is this spiritual model simply the human mind’s response to the foundational contradiction that, as René Girard put it, underlies all culture? And what of the floral arabesques on the female figure—neither distinctly Eastern nor Western—are they examples of Eastern mimicry of Western culture?
In any case, mimicry, with all its risks, finds vivid expression in the cloned bodies Borgnet photographs. Her live performance, staged in the gallery basement at 7 p.m., gathers all these tensions into what could be seen as an allegory of universal mimicry. Echoing the orants’ checkerboard, the performance unfolds on a giant chessboard, where two living figures—completely nude and painted yellow—stand among elements that resemble chess pieces. The symbolic violence of chess, pushed to its limits, speaks for itself.
At the center of the board lies a heap of computer cables—perhaps the game’s most powerful piece, symbolizing the metaphorical weight of technology, even as it appears physically absent.
Flanking the chessboard, two men in everyday clothes, indistinguishable from the audience, take part in the performance. One gives orders; the other follows, removing yellow cardboard squares from the grid using a long pole. A very young man in the background collects and stacks them against a wall. The woman—likened to one of those squares—is sometimes prompted to move. Her treatment echoes the earlier contrast between the male and female orants.
Among the graffiti-like tattoos on the woman’s body is one signature: C. Borgnet, inked onto her foot. It’s not just a nostalgic nod to classical painting. The identification of the artist with her own image is clear. Yet among the many cryptic words on her body, this signature reads like a silent scream—an assertion of individuality against sameness. Even amid the looming threat of erasure, it’s a flash of resistance—short-circuited, perhaps, by the very bundle of cables that dominates this vision.
One cannot easily grasp the full scope of the mystery this work contains—a mystery deeply tied to language and human connection. In the half of the room where the performance takes place, a large wall is covered in a grid of pink, yellow, and white paper squares, inscribed with letter fragments and random marks. Is this the failure of language—the demise of the individual voice—or its possible rebirth, rising through the very fissure that gave rise to binary logic and its distortions? The gentle colors suggest the latter.
If I may close on a personal note, I’ll recount an anecdote from the end of the performance. The performers had returned to their places. I lingered. A very young man in plaid shorts, busy rearranging the cardboard squares, approached and, in a voice tinged with tobacco, asked me: “Should this square go to the king or the queen?”
Caught off guard, I smiled and replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea…”
Neither yes, nor no. Was this my way of echoing the paradox that fuels human culture’s darkest contradictions? Or a momentary joy in dodging the imperative to separate—king from queen, or otherwise? Perhaps, in that moment of undefinable emotion, I added something personal—and therefore essential—to Corine Borgnet’s work.
— Michel Arouimi
The Duel: The Yellow Night
Marie Deparis-yafil 2013
“In the glorification of ‘work,’ in the tireless discourse on the ‘blessing of labor,’ I detect the same underlying motive as in the praise of impersonal, utilitarian acts: a fear of anything individual. Deep down, what we sense today, when we look at ‘work’—always understood as hard labor from morning to night—is that such work acts as the best kind of policing. It keeps everyone on a tight leash and powerfully hinders the development of reason, desire, and the taste for independence. It consumes a tremendous amount of nervous energy, diverting it from reflection, meditation, reverie, from worry, from love and hatred. It constantly keeps the eye fixed on a petty goal, providing regular, easy gratification. A society in which everyone works hard at all times will therefore be more secure—and today, we worship security as the highest of all gods.”
— F. Nietzsche, Dawn (1881), Book III, §173 & §206, trans. J. Hervier, Gallimard, 1970
Curator Marie Deparis invites us to Corine Borgnet’s exhibition The Cure, presented at Galerie Talmart. With joy, we rediscover her objects, her codes, her visual references, through a thematic exploration centered on the world of work. Primarily a sculptor, Corine Borgnet offers a rich artistic journey blending photographic concepts, playful détournements of various media, and diverse scenographies—from cabinets of curiosity… to interactive performances that directly challenge the viewer!
The artist’s work has also often evoked childhood—that enchanted interlude in which the imagination could express itself freely, before confronting the principle of reality that tends—if not to crush, then at least to dull—its dreamlike potential. More precisely, she explores the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood, with its oedipal conflicts and the often painful, even bloody, mourning of a world where everything once seemed possible.
When she turns her gaze here to the working world, pointing out its distortions and questioning the role of art as an alternative, a sarcastic tone reigns—marked by irony and the repurposing of familiar objects. The imaginative world of childhood gives way to the harsher world of adults. A world of performance and profitability, a twisted universe of finance and alienation that mercilessly erases individuality and reverie.
The Post-it note is the central signifier of this system. Elevated to a symbol of bureaucratic life, constantly hammering out the next urgent task, yet always destined to be discarded. This innocuous little slip of colored paper, the epitome of the ephemeral, is playfully reimagined and transformed. Borgnet gives it multiple forms: a laboriously hand-knit “urgent” message, a metallic board scribbled with faux handwriting, and ultimately, her astonishing human Post-its! These become the ultimate medium—Post-its suddenly incarnated—as a scathing denunciation of ruthless productivity, of totalitarian systems, and the cult of disposability.
The caustic satire reaches its peak with the vision of these nude bodies, painted entirely yellow and covered in notes like human memo pads, bearing trivial sums and urgent directives. Here, the uniform is no longer even required—the worker has become objectified and devalued.
Reduced, humiliated, these workers’ bodies are quite literally stored in cubbyholes, laid out like folders—limp, arms dangling—mere extensions of office files in the employer’s eyes...
From the gallery window, a new kind of cabinet of curiosity piques the interest of passersby.
Dozens of objects line the shelves of this strange library, representing the world of the secretary—a recurring figure in Borgnet’s work. Utility and personal affect try to coexist: family portraits of the employee offer comfort, while her severed head—with bulging eyes—seems to mark her final alienation. A forest of Post-its connects everything in this universe where identity fights desperately to survive the depersonalization imposed by function.
Crossed by a tangle of cords and cables she cannot escape, the secretary attempts to warm the cold machinery in which she’s trapped. Picture frames, cosmetic vials, dismembered limbs—like so many sacrifices—are all united under the false cheer of a sickly yellow. As if this merciless environment had, over time, dyed everything it touched.
Meaning falters, boundaries blur in a poignant struggle.
A humorous wink: the “pppp”, an acronym for “the ever-shrinking penis of Mr. Clean.”
In opposition to the universal fantasy of size and performance, Corine Borgnet sculpted a penis directly into a yellow bar of institutional soap—doomed to shrink with each use, mischievously eroded by every touch...
In the vaulted basement of the gallery, we find the exhibition’s titular work: The Cure, a piece that unspools 3,600 Post-its—one for every second of a remote therapy session. Transcribed meticulously from a conversation the artist had with an Iranian therapist living in Sweden, the session touched on her own life, her children, New Yorkers, and the attacks of 9/11.
This cryptic writing is Gregg shorthand, the most common stenography system in the U.S. Each Post-it is marked with a distinctive sign, composing a mural that is both graphic and enigmatic.
On the walls, the photographs unfold one after another. From Unemployment Office to Outsourcing, the Post-it Worker drags his melancholic critique from frame to frame, always set against the backdrop of an abandoned factory.
Borgnet’s sculptures reprise her signature pose: kneeling, arms slack—a gesture suspended somewhere between collapse and prayer. We don’t know whether the figure is falling or rising.
At the opening and closing of the exhibition—during Paris’s famous Nuit Blanche, cheekily renamed Nuit Jaune at Galerie Talmart—a highly original experimental proposition is offered to the public.
The Duel is an interactive performance played out on a life-sized (inhuman?) chessboard, featuring five types of characters:
The world of humans, embodied by the King and Queen (played by two nude actors), covered in markings signifying their function, responding imperiously to every challenge players present on the board.
The world of art, represented by sculptures of the Fool and the Madwoman, evoking what might be called creative madness.
The knights, represented by stools reminiscent of office furniture.
The towers, wrapped in a tangle of cables, symbolizing the realm of communication.
And finally, the world of waste, all too often forgotten: office trash bins filled with Post-its and traces of human activity—an essential presence in Borgnet’s work for over a decade.
Then, like an act of hubris, a grand challenge is thrown out to the crowd: Who dares take on the brutal world of finance?
Losers seeking to rebuild themselves are welcomed into a therapy office absurdly labeled Speed Psy—a final wink at our always-faster consumer society, now infiltrating even the humanist realm of psychology, its ideological opposite.
The therapist (a role graciously entrusted to me…) personifies The Cure—the range of possibilities available to the alienated worker. The alternative swings between the introspective work of therapy and the salvational act of art. The ideal outcome? No alternative at all.
Through sublimation, I proposed to help each participant uncover their creative side and encourage them to develop it through therapy.
A personal approach—playful, sincere, and intense—is what this exhibition offers to every visitor, inviting them to step out of passive observation and into active participation in a rich and thought-provoking system.
Corine Borgnet questions the place of art in a productivity-driven world that veers toward dehumanization. She proposes therapy as a human alternative for reconstruction—when systems attempt to destroy the individual—and she reaffirms art’s redemptive power and its capacity for resistance. Her biting humor, under its playful and impactful surface, touches us deeply—precisely because it is steeped in a dark, haunting poetry: the fragile, candid remnants of childhood.
— Marie Deparis-Yafil
The Cure , Marie Deparis-Yafil, 2013
After Ego Factory, Corine Borgnet returns to Galerie Talmart with The Cure, the second chapter of her critical reflection on work—its objects, its codes, its representations—at the crossroads of a broader meditation on the place of art in a world without mercy for dreamers.
Here, Corine Borgnet chooses to offer their Warholian "fifteen minutes of fame" to those rarely represented in contemporary art—the very field that once claimed another, freer path: to the anonymous workers, to the agents of mass production, to the pawns on the chessboard, trapped within a hierarchical system that—let’s be very clear—watches over them. Through those who’ve lent their facelessness and their features, she attempts to restore to these invisible figures their individuality, their integrity—transcended into art.
Thus, the artist confronts the imagery of the unforgiving world of work and office life, a world whose codes and constraints she deliberately chose to escape. Her exhibition The Cure arises from this stance of resistance but also, as Borgnet often says, from a constant struggle against the loss of childhood’s free spirit and dreams—that enchanted interlude where the pleasure principle, source of all imagination, has not yet collided with reason, reality, and economic necessity.
Her long-running use of the Post-it as sculptural material—chosen as a symbol of corporate life—emerges here as both poetic and sometimes playful escape route, a kind of line of flight from this latest manifestation of the “society of the spectacle,” to borrow Guy Debord’s phrase.
To bureaucratic labor—“the most rational means ever devised for exercising authority over human beings”*—and to alienated labor, in Marx’s dichotomy, Corine Borgnet counters with her own creative labor, casting a sharp eye on the dehumanizing facets of the working world.
Here, visitors are engulfed by oversized memos, lists, and urgent reminders, haunted by the naked bodies of laborers hard at work—treated not as suited employees but as human Post-its. Reduced to pure labor force, to a role as obsolete as any disposable object, they are reified. Vulnerable bodies—fragile, ephemeral, and as discardable as a used Post-it.
Human Post-its.
We find them shelved in cubbies like folders, eyes blank after a long shift, bodies worn out, hungry to reclaim the part of life they “won” by sacrificing the other, as Marx might say—desperately attempting escape. Office men and working girls, stripped of glamour, become a small army of ghosts, sometimes disturbingly crucified on the altar of productivity, profitability, and performance—set in a raw, undecorated universe with neither open spaces nor potted plants, but the cold shell of an abandoned factory.
In the basement of the gallery lies the piece The Cure—an imposing composition nearly five meters long, built entirely of Post-it notes.
Each colored square is marked with a sign—an elliptical figure, a looping line—legible only to a secretary, an old-school one still versed in the art of shorthand. For what we see is in fact the transcription, in Gregg shorthand—the most common stenographic system in the U.S.—of a one-hour therapy session.
Created after the 9/11 attacks, at a time when Borgnet and her family were still living in New York, The Cure unrolls 3,600 Post-its—one for each second of a remote therapy session. It is a meticulous transcription of a conversation the artist had with an Iranian therapist living in Sweden, speaking of herself, her children, New York, and witnessing the attacks live.
It is tempting to draw a parallel between the power of therapy in confronting trauma and the healing potential of art in a world in crisis. Didn’t Schopenhauer say that art is the most salvific of illusions—the ultimate, necessary remedy for the pessimism that inevitably follows from grasping the true nature of the world?
From that intuition, Corine Borgnet seeks to transvalue the torments and more or less covert totalitarianisms of our time into works of art—into a fully realized visual language, with strength and lucidity, like a Nietzschean escape route.
* Max Weber – Categories of Sociology, Volume 1: Economy and Society (1921) – Plon, 1971
— Marie Deparis-Yafil
The Art of Paradox / Frank Morzuch, 2011
The Art of Paradox
Turning a Post-it into a work of art… this is the astonishing challenge that Corine Borgnet invites us to witness! A challenge brilliantly met when the result—of surprising beauty—unfolds in the full glow of its metamorphosis. The strangest part, when the magic takes hold, is how a plain slip of paper, scribbled on in haste, crossed out and underlined in red, can give rise to such a precious piece—a large-format twin of its modest original, like a caterpillar transformed into a butterfly, with its enigmatic, marbled wings embroidered in silk thread.
The emotion it evokes stems from this very paradox: the opposition of haste and care, the ordinary and the exquisite, all grounded in a contradiction that elevates the banal.
Ten years ago, her work made the front page of the New York press. The Tower of Babel—a paper construction made of hundreds of thousands of Post-it notes—evoked the confusion of voices and genres, where messages overlap, vanish, and pile up in a gigantic and absurd monument (from the Latin monumentum, derived from monere, to remind), so that memory, erected as a tower, appears as a series of failed gestures, a sprawling, unsteady mosaic of diversity.
Now synonymous with reminders and quick memos, those self-adhesive squares—traditionally yellow but also available in green, pink, or fluorescent orange—have clearly secured their place in our future. While we once expected that email would save paper and help protect forests, it turns out that computers consume more paper than typewriters ever did. Recycling all these castaways into the branching form of a bonsai, one whose roots dig deep into the memory folds of digital connections, is, for Corine Borgnet, both provocation and aesthetic choice. The irony is unmistakable.
Over ten years ago, she introduced the artistic use of Post-its in North America—an approach that has since inspired imitators. Just last summer, newspapers widely reported on the "Post-it war" waged through office windows, with battles spreading from Paris’s La Défense to Lyon, Lille, and even across the border to Brussels.
What unsettles is the way the artist aims her barbs right where it hurts. Not to finish off the animal, but—like an acupuncturist in a vital act of healing—to restore the connections that awaken the unconscious. The reaction emerges from that buried part of ourselves we fear to reveal, out of anxiety, out of rejection—of the other, of you… those stirrings that, through visual associations, carry us back to adolescence, to the divine monstrosity of a couple rising from the dark waters of childhood, somewhere between desire and dread, lips just brushing the surface.
— Frank Morzuch
Ego Factory / Marie Deparis-Yafil, 2012
“In the glorification of ‘work,’ in the tireless discourse on the ‘blessing of labor,’ I detect the same underlying motive as in the praise of impersonal and utilitarian acts: a fear of anything individual. Ultimately, what we sense today, when we observe what is called ‘work’—always understood as relentless toil from morning till night—is that such labor constitutes the best kind of policing: it keeps everyone in check and is expertly designed to hinder the development of reason, desire, and the taste for independence. It consumes extraordinary amounts of nervous energy, diverting it from thought, reflection, daydreams, worries, love, and hatred. It keeps our eyes fixed on petty goals and delivers regular, easy satisfaction. Thus, a society in which everyone is always working will enjoy greater security—and today, security is worshipped like the supreme deity.”
— F. Nietzsche, Dawn (1881), Book III, §§173 and 206, trans. J. Hervier, Gallimard, 1970
“Ego Factory” is a disused warehouse temporarily transformed into a frenzied creation plant—a personal art-making factory.
One might assume that Corine Borgnet is treating herself to an artistic “ego trip” with Ego Factory—and the title seems to confirm it. With no curator or gallerist involved (except a certain Edmond Lessieur from London, of whom nothing is known), she builds her show in her space, like a gift to herself. Upon entering the raw space of this former factory—which she will soon convert into a living and working place—it’s tempting to see it as a projection of her inner landscape.
But that would miss the nuanced distance Borgnet always maintains—and her awareness that the process of reflection, creation, and effort needed to produce “one’s” work requires a solid ego, a refined form of narcissism. That’s precisely what she plays with here—not naive about that more or less secret driver behind all artistic creation: the desire to be seen, recognized, even admired. As Paul Ardenne wrote, “Narcissism is the foundation of art… The artist always acts out of a need for recognition and a lack of love.”
Borgnet also intuits the trust that artists must place in their subjectivity, to dare show the world how they see it—in search of that *“meeting point between two narcissisms: the artist’s and the viewer’s, where these two self-loves may touch, may merge.”*¹
And to achieve that, as she does here, she brings everything to the table: desire, energy, passion—but also pride and belief.
So it’s not just her own ego she’s humorously referencing, but the ego of every artist, everywhere.
Ego Factory thus becomes a dream factory, a creation machine, and Borgnet clearly delights in playing with the idea—so much so that she promises to sell the artworks “at factory prices.”
Of course, no Factory without a nod to Warhol. Having lived in New York for many years, Borgnet’s work—particularly the Office Art series shown here—shares certain affinities with Pop Art and American conceptualism.
In this temporary Factory, transformed for the project into a production site for the ego, Borgnet sought to recreate, in her own way and at her own scale, something of the Warholian spirit—gathering energies, ideas, and people to produce a new photographic series. In a sense, Ego Factory is a pirouette, since she did not work alone, and proudly acknowledges it.
But wasn't Warhol’s Factory also a machine for producing myth, superstars, and fifteen minutes of fame? These ambitions stand in curious—and not entirely contradiction-free—contrast with the exhibition’s subject matter, which centers on anonymous workers, the agents of mass production, the pawns on the corporate chessboard—trapped in a hierarchical system that, let’s be clear, keeps a close watch on them...
So Borgnet attempts here to restore individuality and integrity—transcended into artworks—to these invisible figures, through those who lent them their facelessness and their features.
Here we find the indomitable “artist’s ego” grappling with the imagery of a pitiless world—the world of work and office life—a world whose codes and constraints she has deliberately chosen to flee. Ego Factory emerges from this stance of resistance, but also—as she often puts it—from a constant struggle against the loss of inner freedom and childhood dreams. That enchanted window of time where the pleasure principle—the engine of all imagination—has yet to collide with reason, the reality principle, and economic necessity.
The Post-it, which Borgnet has worked with for years as sculptural material and symbol of corporate life, becomes a plastic alternative, a poetic escape route, sometimes playful—a line of flight from this ultimate manifestation of the society of the spectacle, to use Guy Debord’s phrase.
To bureaucratic labor—“the most rational means known for exercising imperative control over human beings”²—and to alienated labor, in Marx’s dichotomy, Corine Borgnet opposes her own creative labor, casting a sharp and lucid gaze at how the world of work can dehumanize us.
Here, the viewer is surrounded by oversized reminders, lists, and urgent notes; haunted by the naked bodies of laborers, repurposed as Post-its instead of wearing their work attire. Individuals reduced to labor force alone, to functions as obsolete as an outdated object—reified. Vulnerable, fragile bodies—just as disposable and short-lived as used Post-it notes.
Human Post-its.
We find them stacked in cubbies like folders, blank-eyed after long hours, their bodies slumped, longing to reclaim outside the part of life they “won” by forfeiting the other part, as Marx might say. They struggle in vain to escape their prison. Office men and working girls, stripped of glamour—a small army of ghosts, at times genuinely unsettling, crucified on the altar of productivity, efficiency, and well-executed work.
All this unfolds in a stark, unembellished world—no open space, no green plants—but a disused factory. And one can’t help but ask: what place does the ego have in this factory?
With strength and clarity, in a fully mature visual language, Corine Borgnet moves away from a realistic depiction of work and offers a dreamlike vision—hovering between fantasy and the fantastic—a powerful and deeply compelling vision.
¹ Daniel Sibony, Création. Essai sur l’art contemporain, Paris, Seuil, 2005
² Max Weber, The Categories of Sociology, vol. 1: Economy and Society (1921), Plon, 1971
— Marie Deparis-Yafil
The Young , Marie Deparis-yafil, 2007
The Art of Corine Borgnet: Between Fantasy and Fracture
Marie Deparis-Yafil
Corine Borgnet’s work, under its playful and unusual surface, is entirely rooted in the world of childhood—which she conceives as both the original and final territory of freedom. It’s not that she feels nostalgic for that “enchanted parenthesis,” but rather that she sees this stage of life as a privileged space-time where the dual hold of the pleasure principle and the fears of childhood—the birthplace of all imagination—have not yet clashed with rationality, with the reality principle, or with economic necessity. It is in this whimsical and unbound spirit that Borgnet draws the fuel for her creativity—a continuous struggle against the loss of childhood dreams and wonder. Reclaiming that world is what led her back to art, after a detour through the office towers of New York.
That said, the “childhood world” of Corine Borgnet is far from infantile, and bears little resemblance to the sanitized, sugary, and reassuring imagery of animation studios. Here, the “pretty,” the flowers, the Lolitas, the angel wings, the smooth resin sculptures—these are only a fragile gloss over something darker and stranger, something uncanny, faceless, devoured by childhood fears and adolescent anxieties. A thin shield against the beguiling power of those shadowy worlds.
Though not explicitly narrative, her work rests on a complex storytelling foundation. Through evocations of fairy tales, legends, myths, or literary figures—from Little Red Riding Hood to The Wizard of Oz, from Donkeyskin to Ophelia, from the Cyclops to Medusa—each with universal resonance, Borgnet explores essential psychological and identity-based questions. These stories speak of inner shifts, deep transformations, mutations and metamorphoses, and the psychological forces that shape them: the awakening of sexuality, the loss of innocence, a certain brutality and a kind of gentleness, confrontation with death—all of which deeply imprint the bodies she creates. These are fragmented bodies, as fragmented as memory itself, sometimes reduced to hollow heads, empty shells, reptilian skins shedding their essence (Shell, 2005).
The artist’s universe emerges at the crossroads of classical culture and the teeming imagery of the gothic, underground, and punk worlds. There are echoes of Japanese horror films and the unique atmospheres of certain Gus Van Sant films that explore adolescent realms of identity and disorientation.
At times, her work leans into melancholy. In charcoal, she sketches apparitions—faces like the pale Ophelia “on the calm black water where the stars sleep,” to borrow Rimbaud’s line. These drawings evoke an expressionist and symbolist mood—or that of Narcissus, the parable of the adolescent fascinated by his own reflection, by the experience of sensitivity and suffering, who, as Tiresias warned, could only grow old if he never came to know himself. These are stories of solitude, of mystery and pure strangeness, of free associations and poetic slippages—all in pursuit of some kind of purity…
Though formally different from her resin sculptures, the Tower of Babel project made of Post-its—which she first created in 2001—is not so distant in spirit. Her use of this small, throwaway paper object, a symbol of corporate culture and office life, becomes a poetic escape from adulthood. It is a way of reclaiming one of the tools of the working world by transforming it into an artwork. Collected by the hundreds from friends, from Columbia University, and from the United Nations headquarters—an archetypal Babel tower where she once worked—she assembled these scrawled, doodled, multilingual Post-its into a precarious 4-meter structure. This fragile, living monument offers a contemporary twist on the myth of Babel: less solemn, but fully aware of its vulnerability.
In the biblical myth, God punished human arrogance by fracturing communication through the invention of language diversity. Since then, the unfinished tower has come to symbolize the “hope” of a universal language, of mutual understanding. Borgnet continues to reactivate this hope with a new Babel Tower to come…
It is again with this unconventional material that she explores, in The Cure, the world of psychoanalytic therapy. Here too, the fracture between childhood and adulthood—a central axis of analytic work—emerges as the very substance of the piece.
Influenced by American Pop Art and the legacy of the Ready-Made, Borgnet’s practice sometimes aligns—metaphorically and poetically—with the absurd or transgressive gestures of artists like Robert Gober or Bryan Crockett, with whom she has long collaborated. Through this lens, she examines contemporary myths—both Dionysian and nostalgic—evoking imaginary golden ages and the contradictions of the present.
Corine Borgnet is deeply attentive to the process of materializing her intent, always seeking coherence in the meaning she infuses into her work. She explains her choice to deliberately separate the “portrait” from the body in her sculptures, so as not to personalize them too literally, or to restrict the viewer’s imaginative projection. What remains, she says, should be “an image, a memory, a sensation”—a silhouette in the blur of memory, more than a specific object. In the same vein, she chooses resin as her material: simple, smooth, almost a “non-material,” allowing attention to shift from matter (the signifier) to the image (the signified). For her, poiesis must take precedence over technical virtuosity.
The treatment of the portrait is different, however, when it comes to photography or charcoal drawings, sometimes accented with acrylic. Here, what matters is expressive intensity—between expressionism, romanticism, and dreamlike abstraction. Consistent with the spirit of her resin works, children’s or adolescents’ faces emerge and reflect themselves in water, like in a mirror. A mirror that is both surface and depth, both sanctuary and trap, maternal and menacing, origin and end. Between Ophelia, Echo, and Narcissus, she unfolds landscapes of twilight, of turmoil, shadow, and sudden shafts of light—creating a phantasmagoric world with an almost cinematic sense of atmosphere.
From work to work, Corine Borgnet sketches the contours of a mythology that is at once intimate and universal—whose poetic strangeness resonates in us, rekindling our memories, our past selves, and the fractures we carry.
Artwork Commentaries by Isabelle de Maison Rouge, 2017
Getting Ready to Enter History, Self-Portrait as Rembrandt (2017)
Like all artists, Corine Borgnet began by studying her scales—feeding on Western culture and tracing her artistic lineage by carefully observing the great masters and their references. She built her own genealogy within art history. So, when she stumbled upon a reproduction of a Rembrandt self-portrait and discovered a striking physical resemblance to the Dutch master, she didn’t hesitate to recreate the pose in front of the camera. To confirm it for herself, to engage in a face-to-face encounter—but also to make something new from something old, borrowing in order to create.
This approach could be called an iconoclastic or irreverent tribute, a kind of reworking of the artist’s original question, and a reflection on the timeless, central theme of the artist’s craft. Referencing the classics is also a way to speak to or through someone else in order to ultimately speak of oneself, of art, of the artist—and of the human condition more broadly. With this gesture, Borgnet offers a form of introspection, an attempt to express a deeper self—one far removed from ego or the self-destructive tendencies of humanity, a vision of the disembodied Other.
Ceci n’est plus une poule (This Is No Longer a Chicken), 2017
Corine Borgnet uses chicken bones to compose messages—almost like aphorisms. She doesn’t carve into the bone but instead discovers, in the small remnants, visual associations that evoke letterforms, which she then assembles into word sequences that gradually form phrases. The deliberate poverty of the material is an act of survival, evoking humanity reduced to its most basic expression, struggling to communicate using primitive signs. Or perhaps it’s an ironic posture—an artist’s shortcut to get to the essence.
These “holy scriptures” take the form of short, radical texts—urgent exhortations, written in English or French. Deep thoughts, disguised as trivial ones. Once again, there’s a nod to art history—this time to Magritte. Indeed, this is no longer poultry but the remnants of a meal transmuted into a still life. A heuristic, self-reflexive work… Which came first—the chicken or the egg?
Papillon Nobilius Epheramus
Houndstooth—“pied-de-poule” in French—is a black-and-white woven wool pattern originally found on the warm clothing of Scottish shepherds. In English, it’s called houndstooth, literally “dog’s tooth.” But in French, the same shape is seen as a “chicken’s foot”—a misalignment of interpretation that turns from dog to chicken, a recurring and nearly iconic subject in Corine Borgnet’s work. And here, it’s… a butterfly.
It was the Prince of Wales who first popularized the houndstooth suit in 1934. The pattern was quickly embraced by the English upper class, becoming a symbol of elegance. Ironically, three years later, the same aristocrat would shock the world by abdicating the throne to marry a commoner—an American divorcée. Thus, he became the former King Edward VIII.
This reminds Corine Borgnet of her own grandfather, who, for love, married a young woman beneath his social rank—and in doing so, lost that elusive mark of nobility. A mark she cheekily crosses out in the title of her book.
Épitaphe toi-même (Epitaph Yourself)
A white marble plaque, like those seen in cemeteries, with its gleaming gold letters, fastened at each corner with matching golden nails. But the epitaph itself seems off-kilter—as if it missed the mark entirely. One might even say… it’s a bit off the plaque. It reads more like a childish motto, even a nursery rhyme.
No one likes to think of their own death, to imagine the self as vanished, erased from memory, returned to dust. We prefer to yield our place to others, quietly.
In this small yet impactful piece, Corine Borgnet gives shape to our fear of the unknown that is death—and to the vanity of our desire to leave a mark at all costs. It’s written: our fate is sealed. There’s no escaping this shared finitude. With this laconically witty inscription, in the spirit of Sacha Guitry’s dark humor, the artist includes herself in the equation, reminding us all of life’s fatal outcome—and finding, quite literally, the last word. Her wish? That this be the plaque placed on her own grave.
Isabelle de Maison Rouge
Artwork Commentaries by Marie Deparis-Yafil (2017)
Bourgeoisie, 2016
This body of work marks a pivotal moment in Corine Borgnet’s creative journey—one after which public perception, captivated by these unusual sculptures, began to see her work through a fresh, if not entirely new, lens. These rounded forms in Jesmonite—a smooth acrylic resin that the artist patiently and meticulously covers with pencil drawings—play with what she herself calls “visual oxymorons,” both plastically and semantically. Fusing drawing with sculpture, these pieces evoke malleable, indeterminate substances—perhaps organic matter—each locked in confrontation with a hard material (stone, wood, chisel…), creating formal and symbolic duels. At stake is a paradoxical tension between compression and expansion, freedom and repression, normativity and transgression.
This tension is heightened by her use of toile de Jouy-inspired drawings—motifs she associates with childhood (wallpaper from her early home). Here, the soft drawn shape represents the bourgeoisie, while the confronting object stands in for toil, labor, punishment—echoes of class struggle made sculptural.
Fashion Victim, Madonna in Houndstooth, 2017
"Your gown will be my trembling desire" —Charles Baudelaire, To a Madonna
Corine Borgnet’s recent research has focused heavily on motif. After her exploration of narrative designs like toile de Jouy, she turned toward a more graphic, black-and-white pattern: houndstooth, which she animates with a near-cinematic rhythm. Among the many theories surrounding its origin, the one she prefers traces it back to 19th-century Scottish shepherds, where the pattern allegedly symbolized neutrality in clan disputes. Fascinated by this evolution, Borgnet notes how this rustic symbol of peace was later adopted into noble and elite fashion—from Edward VIII to Christian Dior.
Thus, a once-rural emblem becomes bourgeois, wrapped unexpectedly—and perhaps irreverently—around wings of butterflies, the robe of a Madonna. Covering a delicate reproduction of a Raphael found on a New York sidewalk with gouache in this “fashionable” print, she replaces the classic Marian blue or virginal white with something far less sacred. The result? A gentle desacralization of the icon she no longer believes in.
La Source, 2004
La Source is unique within Corine Borgnet’s corpus, if only because she isn’t the author—but rather the subject—of the drawing. Created for an exhibition on childhood, it is a portrait of her as a young girl, drawn from memory by her mother. Though she recalls the plaid dress with some bitterness—it was worn to the point of threadbare—Borgnet has long held a deep interest in childhood, and naturally, her own.
Her work isn’t strictly autobiographical, but it draws heavily on those subterranean foundations. In this sense, La Source operates on many levels: every mother is a source; Borgnet’s mother gave birth to her vocation; and perhaps most hauntingly, this childlike figure—missing its head, the paper torn away—answers, with silent violence, the faceless children Borgnet has so often rendered.
When asked, her mother explained, “I botched the head,” and so she simply cut it off. No need for psychoanalysis: Borgnet chose to show the piece exactly as received. It is her. But her mother has taken her head.
I Have a Doubt, 2007
A faceless angel, the sculpture I Have a Doubt teeters on a precarious balance, feeding uncertainty through its ambiguity.
Is it a guardian of dreams, a triumphant figure vanquishing our inner monsters? Or perhaps an Icarus, warning of the dangers of dreaming too high? A ghostly entity suspended between worlds—between life and death, earth and sky, reality and dream?
Or maybe it’s a blank canvas of a figure, smooth and pure, upon which projections of identity, fantasy, and even the old theological question of angelic gender can be cast.
Or again, it might be one of those terrible children, ready to live wildly and without restraint, feverishly exploring childhood as the last frontier of freedom—an elusive time where the pleasure principle and irrational imagination have not yet collided with the demands of adulthood.
Porte-Peau, 2007
Within Corine Borgnet’s body of work, Porte-Peau occupies a singular, unruly place—resistant to categories and affiliations. It is perhaps one of her most powerful creations, born not from calculated intent but from a raw, intuitive force. Its story—its birth, evolution, and eventual destruction—reads like a saga, tragic and epic in scope.
But Porte-Peau is no phoenix. It has never risen from its own ashes as it once was. Each of its incarnations—sculpture, ritual object, performance, video, relic—represents not resurrection, but resilience. Not rebirth, but resistance. Corine Borgnet, undeterred and unresigned, refuses the annihilation of her work, transfiguring it instead into a continuous act of creation—until the very end.
Pince X, 2006
Like in a dream, certain pieces in Corine Borgnet’s oeuvre emerge with the force of the irrational—piercing reality through their surreal, unsettling nature. These small resin-and-silicone sculptures operate like intrusions. Strange objects—tools gnawed by roots, hybrids worthy of Lynch or Burton—seep into consciousness with a hallucinatory ease. Nothing surprises anymore, not even horror.
Though her aesthetic often borrows the language of childhood—fairy tales, legends, myths—this is not a childish world. It’s a fragile glaze atop something far darker: the unnamed, the faceless, the uncanny, devoured by childhood fears and adolescent anxieties. A thin veil shielding us from the seductive pull of shadow.
These are stories of solitude, mystery, and poetic disorientation—told in slippages and juxtapositions, freely imagined and intensely felt.
Marie Deparis-Yafil