Russell Collection Inventory

Corinne loves to remind everyone that her origins are Spanish on her mother's side, but that she finds herself closer to the Auvergne on her father?s side. Her father, who is an earthy metalworker, proudly proclaims that he belongs to the lineage of the blacksmith, Emile PUZENAT, who created an agricultural machinery manufacturing plant in Bourbon-Lancy in 1874, which, from father to son, became today's powerful IVECO factory. Nothing in this industrial saga predestined Corinne for Art studies. She does not feel, for all that, concerned by high technology engines. She found it less foreboding to study Biology in the Caen Science Faculty, after her baccalauréat. Her studies only resulted in university unemployment; and perhaps that was her stoke of luck: in truth, she found more than ever the time to draw and no longer hesitates to radically modify her direction in life. She was only 24 when she joined the Claude Pissarro Atelier in the winter of 1998. She was a student of his for a few years, before becoming his assistant and finally his wife. Then, in order to passionately embrace the asceticism of her commitment to painting, she very quickly decided to leave France with her husband to set up on the edge of the Atlantic, in one of the wildest, most isolated and infertile regions of the far North of the Republic of Ireland. There, among this desolation, where the fury of the wind can, on certain days, strip the soil, incredibly, she decided to paint only flowers. She does not do so to distinguish herself from the seventeen other artists of the profuse Pissarro genealogy, to which she now belongs. Through this challenge, she intends instead to flee the intellectual pretence of "Contemporary Art". Far from any compassion for oneself, it is a question of anchoring oneself in the humility of pictorial practice without prestige, and to attempt, through this asceticism, to avoid altogether any pretence, embellishment or other illusions. The sweet and innocuous placidity of flowers conceals a crude contemplative position truly experienced in art as a challenge of solitude. There would be no exaggeration in saying that while retreated into isolation, hermetically sealed from external influences, Corinne only got used to the studio. Besides, in this family, ever since the grandfather, Camille, the art of painting has been passed down from father to son in a virtual tribal educational autarky. Except perhaps for the Bonins, sons of Jeanne, whose father was not a artist, all the Pissarros learnt to paint "at home" without ever attending a School of Arts. So be it, even if Hugues-Claude shamefully admits that he was the Massier in the Académie Julian for a while. This perhaps explains why in Corinne's case, the conciseness of this lapidary artwork that does not require a Father. That said, without believing more than one can be sure of what we think we know ( !)? And there, Christophe Carraud usefully reminds us that MORANDI said one day to PALEZIEUX: "For me it is very simple, I copy what I can see". And Carraud added: "There are enigmatic obvious facts, fringes of silence, sesames" but "Clever are those who can go further". Is it not good to repeat: "Clever are those who can go further". Otherwise said, one does not plod like a policeman, beating silence like the countryside, to grab Corinne's flowers by the collar. She paints flowers and she wants to stick to that. That is it. One guesses however that the peremptory choice of such a subject, that is more amenable and submissive than any other, has been made because of its very same docility. One also sees that she treats her bouquets as a portrait artist, without evidently being confronted by the pathos of a face. The slight theatrical nature of the scene is reduced to four roles: flowers / vase / background / floor, where the presence of beauty in this voluntary simplism, coalesce into infinite combinations. Corinne But still: if one is willing to admit that it is not essential to hold forth longer on the formal aspect of the artist's approach, one could perhaps, once silence has returned, hear the breath beating or rising, like on the steep slope of a goat track that one must continually climb, yes the breath of the drawing whispering day after day. One should see this infinite patience accumulated by Corinne, who draws with heavy lines without ever using construction lines, without setting in place, without the slightest possibility of repentance when starting with the detail of a leaf or a petal, for a period of several hours for a drawing of implacable truth, which she covers, as soon as it is finished, with a blinding layer of paint, and which no one except Hughes and the two small ones could have seen. But in one's heart, here, in the softness of the shadow where one shuts oneself away, is it not natural to keep the secret? Pomié (Ireland - County Donegal) February 2005

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