Corneille

Private Collection, Europe

La terre est blanche de soleil evokes the mineralogical Spanish landscapes of Cadaquès and Ibiza, where Corneille travelled in 1962. He went to meet Picasso and Miró and transcribed his impressions of the sun and the Mediterranean earth in luminous strokes of colour. The composition changes as you observe it, and the superimposition of colours combined with the transparency of the gouache make the light vibrate. Far from the monotony of an arid panorama, this gouache offers a changing landscape where the imagination and the eye escape to reveal sometimes the presence of characters, sometimes buildings or rocky mountains.

In the catalogue for the Corneille exhibition at the Galerie Colette Allendy in 1954, the art critic Charles Estienne described Corneille's work as "abstraction in germination". This was his way of describing the work of an artist who takes figurative representation as his starting point, but frees himself from it to appeal to a multiplicity of meanings.

Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1922. He was inspired by the works of Paul Klee and Joan Miró, whom he greatly admired, but his artistic freedom also led him to study the great masters of Impressionism and their teaching on the treatment of colours, such as Vincent van Gogh. A founding member of the CoBra group in 1948, alongside Karel Appel, Constant, Christian Dotremont and Asger Jorn, he continued this constant search for freedom from the diktats of established codes of representation after the group's dissolution. With his great artistic independence, he came to be associated with the lyrical abstraction group and, from 1957, took part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris.

In 1962, Corneille was at the peak of his artistic career and had his first solo exhibition in New York, at the Lefebre gallery. In the fullness of his art, and during this happy period of his life, he produced a series of gouaches on mineralogical landscapes, to which this work belongs.