About the 'Nothingness' of the Cross

The artist Thierry De Cordier (1954) has built up an exciting and complex introspective oeuvre in the course of a few decades. He is a ‘literary artist’ who makes use of all kinds of linguistic and expressive forms to give shape to his own visual idiom.

Since the 1980s he has been a painter, sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, poet and philosopher all at the same time, not from delusions of grandeur, but from inner despair and artistic motivation. He deploys every plastic resource and possibility to flesh out his poetic misanthropy, never gratuitous, always well thought out and ironical. His oeuvre is determined by motifs such as the rejection of modernity (‘I have absolutely nothing to do with the XXth century’), loneliness, security, and the longing to be an individual (old-fashioned handwritten letters in blue ink). His Weltschmerz finds expression in the predominantly dark shades of blue, grey and black.

The obscure and remarkable heliogravures Crucifixions, no more and Nada are inspired by Velázquez’ famous painting of 1631 The Crucifixion, showing the crucifixion of a young man against the background of the night. This ultimate symbol of ‘the solitary human figure in a menacing universe’ is seized by De Cordier to underline his difficult relation with Catholicism and his own fragile position as a non-conformist individual. In completely disguising the crucifixion with his black tints (in two stages: a study with some light in a smaller format, and an ink-black, definitive version in a larger format), he marks a resolute break with religion and emphasises his (and our) threatened individuality.

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