The Anal Staircase

Sophie Delhasse : How has your collaboration started ?

Corentin Canesson : First with Julien Monnerie and Maëla Bescond, we created an art space : STANDARDS. We were curators more than artists. The drawings and paintings in a duo arrived in 2014.

SD : Can we talk about a protocol or a creative process ? One draws and the other one paints.

CC : It’s rather a kind of working process to create automatism, which we could call process or protocol. To avoid boredom or a slightly futile comfort, there often are rules or constraints that we impose ourselves before starting a project. In Liege, for instance, the constraint is to use only black and white. However, if we follow the idea of the game, there is always a moment when a cheating element is going to pop up, which will enable us to consider a major gap between what we plan and what is going to happen. Very often it comes from contextual elements that are peculiar to the invitation such as : the place where we are invited to exhibit and/or to work, what we read at that moment, the music we listen to, the news, a reference found randomly or a joke heard in a bar.

SD : You have integrated in the window Bastien Cosson’s canvas exhibited in the 1st edition of Art au Centre. Do you consider this presence as a sign of collaboration ?

CC : It is rather the idea of immediately bringing a possibility of absorption to the project, so we can, while we are going to work in situ or during the months of the exhibition, host other gestures, other works, other artists Then, let’s simply say that fortunately we know Bastien Cosson pretty well and we wanted from the start to produce an accumulation and also to play with a certain temporality of the project Art au Centre in Liege. If you follow where we want to get, we would be very happy to leave our pieces and Bastien’s to another artist for the third edition, and after some time, let’s say ten years, to offer this great set to the city of Liege to foster the construction of a slightly special museum…

SD : What place do you give to the title of the works ?

You are both part of TNHCH, how do you integrate music to art and art to music ?

CC : We choose the title of a song as a starting point.  We listen to music when we work, so it’s something that naturally integrates our artistic practice. And it obliges us to lead us to practice music on our own.The text, the words are also really important to bring to attention the things we can’t mean by drawing, painting or even by playing music.