WITHOUT FAITH OR FORM
2014 - 2024
When the artist plants a revolutionary paving stone into the Toile de Jouy, the message seems quite clear. But it becomes more complex with the perforated plates, which still refer to the popular Mayan tradition though, be warned, only for its dignitaries because it is through the pierced path of the object placed at the head of the «satiated and celebrated» deceased that their lightened soul will reach eternity and salvation.
Here, Corine Borgnet plays with the motif, its symbolism and its misappropriations, castigating a society entangled in its religious paraphernalia, its warlike trinkets and its bourgeois contradictions. Clothing serves as the paragon of an asserted class relationship: «When the bourgeois man dresses, the brute covers himself», wrote Balzac.
The iconoclastic artist reinterprets houndstooth, a protective motif and symbol of peace, tracing back to the tartan of Scottish shepherds. Ennobled over centuries by the English Crown and later cemented as an emblem of the House of Dior from the 1930s onward, the pattern is here transformed to the point of resembling a keffiyeh, undergoing an unintended yet subversive shift from elite fashion to the scarred symbolism of contested resistance.
