Torsos

Corno expresses coarsely her opinions. Without any doubt, this forthrightness
transpires in her paintings, playing in a world of paradox - tender and violent,
careful and sudden, fine and strong, "Life is full of contradictions", she says.

Corno, New York

 Corno Studio - Paintings of the human body

Part of the fascination I had for Géricault's Medusa came out of my heightened awareness of the sexual energy in that painting, in that bizarre, carnal scene. But what scene, and how how can that be? How can sexuality and lust have anything to do with carnage and desparation? How can mangled bodies have anything to do the entanglements of lust.

I sat in Paris alone again, after six months alone in the North. Perhaps that was it. I had passed the Mona Lisa, the previously mentioned armless Venus. Everywhere I looked human flesh reminded me of human desire. I directed my search to this place to look quietly upon the huge painting, where in Julian Barne's book I had learned to trace the details of its history, its subject, the tragedy it portrayed. But the north was powerfully lonely, and human contact was wanting, so everywhere I looked the strength and passion of the art on the wall reminded me of my own inner tensions and desires.

Those men, cramped together on the small raft, in the hot sun, then the blistering sea. I could understand the tensions in their strained bodies, in their stomachs and thighs. Géricault chose to define their bodies with classic lines here, with absurdly realistic lines there, but the torso was drawn with the precision of someone understanding the hunger, yet knowing the power that can rise up from one's own guts. My stomach tightens too.

Corno sees beauty on the surface of the human stomach. I am not sure she sees the inner tension as does Géricault though. Her work, instead, searches for some ideal mid-section, the human body as hard as steel, the superman of the fashion world. She has made a name for herself in New York. People hang her paintings in the hallways of their penthouse suites.

I look up at the men, tangled flesh, some of them already dead. The cartoon image of the ever-tightening belt solving the problem of hunger. Then the African in the middle of the canvas, providing a dark center which speaks of worlds of hungry children just a few hundred kilometres to the west of the ship, and a couple hundred years into the future. But these men are also strong, so the line of site moves away from the weak on the surface of the raft, to those who have climbed high above the others to wave desparately for the ship.

The body reaching skyward, making all the tension in the torso stretch out and up like the expandable shell of a mythical insect. The pop art of Corno strives to hide that quality, Géricault exploits it, creating a colony of suffering. Corno creates individuals. Géricault reminds us we are all part of the same stew.

When I see a painting by Corno I imagine not the subject, but the artist. She is in her luxurious New York apartment, holding the phone while she paints, speaking a forced and overly pretentious English with a French accent not of her native Québec, dabbing pink where there should only and always be gold. For pink, however true of the shade of a certain variety of human skin, pink avoids the soul. It speaks more of Warhol and nightclubs than of the human experience.

Isabelle's torso in summer, a taught maple skin, a natural blend of feminity and strength, a place in time. Her people too have suffered, at the hands of the white man who came suddenly up the sheer Saguenay cliffs, bearing goods, alcohol and lard. Culture crushing lard. Isabelle lies quietly in the sun, on the shores of Lac-St-Jean, on the hot black and rust coloured sand. Julian plays agressively in the waves. Time has brought me here, far from the crashing sea. The lake brushes up against the shore like a thick whisky soup. The only boats that pass do so quietly, in the distance. Even the younger women in their fashionable swimwear are out of site, around edge of the dunes. I am far away from the contraints of fine art.

Corno also paints women. Women are not a part of the company on the Raft of the Medusa, but they are there nonetheless, in the very name of the ship. They are there in the mythical associations we have with the sea, and in the entangled web of bodies we often associate with the complex web of a lady spider. "Medusa was a terrible monster who had laid waste to the country. She was once a beautiful maiden whose hair was her chief glory, but as she dared to vie in beauty with Athena, the goddess deprived her of her charms and changed her beautiful ringlets into hissing serpents. She became a cruel monster of so frightening an aspect that no living thing could behold her without being turned into stone." (Bulfinch)

But, "Cixous explains that this monstrous image of the Medusa exists only because it has been directly determined by the male gaze.... Tragedy fell upon her when she was confronted with endless hardships brought upon by male actions."(Source) Likewise, I cannot help but think that Corno's drive to paint images of women is also driven by the male imagination. We look for the perfect angle, and the colours we require are only those that match the furniture. Géricault paints torsos rapped in a well-composed composition. Medusa's serpent grasp is still one that is contrived and mathematical. But these "male warnings" are not natural to women, or even to men. And so fiction, like art, does not imitate life or human relationships, but projects instead egos, calculations, and, of course, money.

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