Quotes
Your chemigrams are richer than you.
Henri Michaux, 1960
You are vying with God ...
Saul Steinberg, 1961
Cordier is a purist. One readily imagines him at the Bauhaus alongside Moholy-Nagy.
Mario de Biasi, 1966
Pierre Cordier is exploring a purely visual world where analogies to reality are always fortuitous.
Jacques Meuris, 1966
The most radical and also the most exciting variant in the use of the photosensitive surface.
Grytzko Mascioni, January 30 1967
The pictures, here, attempt to deal with the universal through abstraction rather than through symbol; the chemigrams themselves are conceived as unique objects, rather than as the copy for mass media reproduction; they are not to be regarded as windows on the world, but rather as synthesized bits of the world itself, with their own color and texture and shape and provenance.
John Szarkowski MoMA, NY, 1967
I am very interested in these images that you sent because I think you are doing very well with some of the grafic experimentations which photography is so much in need of.
Minor White, 1968
You, however, don’t want to show what can be seen, nor what can be perceived. You want to make visible what is invisible, you don’t realize what you’re getting yourself into.
Jean-Michel Folon, 1973
Cordier’s enchanting chemigrams [...] are both visually and conceptually an amalgam of two important and revered traditions in art’s modern history: constructivism and surrealism.
Aaron Scharf, 1973
I fully agree with your undertaking to combine the techniques of painting with photographic material. As far as I’m concerned, the results are worthy. The painter has of course the right to choose whatever technique he wishes in order to fulfill his artistic aspirations and feelings.
Alexandre Alexeieff, 1974
A camera is somewhat like a brush that concentrates light, the pen one uses to write with; but one can also use other pens and it seems to me that you’re a great example...
Michel Tournier France Culture, July 18 1974
Thank you for the « magnifique extraordinaire » to which you have given birth.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, 1974
What you’ve obtain from your technique is diabolical - and very beautiful.
Brassaï, Beaulieu-sur-Mer 1974
Is it still photograpy? Is it already painting? It is useless to ask these questions. What matters is that the author allows for miniscule events to occur, that he encourages some and gives others up and that, thanks to this experimentation, we see new artistic variations that could not have been realized with only one technique. What is of value today, and Pierre Cordier had the courage to try this a long time ago, is to blend the techniques of communication.
Pierre Sterckx, January 27 1974
His chemigrams have fascinated me ever since I first saw them twenty years ago.
Helmut Gernsheim, 1976
Certainly, chemigrams are hybrid. But why not welcome them as the Future Phenomena that Marcel Duchamp’s Mixed Media inaugurated half a century ago ?
René Micha, 1976
Chemigrams are without a doubt a milestone in the development of formal photography and its history. A painter would find it difficult to equal the precision structures and the colors in Pierre Cordier’s works.
Otto Steinert, 1976
Your [...] chemigrams [...] are quite fascinating.
Bill Brandt, 1977
Pierre Cordier has chosen a new path full of difficulties. I believe he was right to do so.
Georges Brassens, 1979
False photographs of what is inaccessible and unseen. Real images of a nonexistent world. The other side of the mirror and of the silver bromide.
André Balthazar, 1982
There are aspects of your works that are characteristic of post modernism. You shatter the genres and the codes; physical sense and sensitivity are in the process itself.
James Guitet, 1985
Your Chemigram is a great achievement that nobody has tried before. I believe that your work will be well appreciated here [in Japan] although I can imagine there will be much controversial criticism.
Eikoh Hosoe, 1985
Pierre Cordier has brought humor, art history, innovations, unusual and special skills to photography. He challenges the art/photography landscape with a new and sometimes outlandish look.
Aaron Siskind, 1985
It is said there are nine arts. Is yours the tenth ?
Gaston Bertrand, 1986
Bravo for the labyrinths that give respite from the thick daubes that are without mystery.
Jacques Monory, 1991
I believe you know magnificently how to combine the ideal conditions which can awake the spectator’s genius. From the first glance, we enter into a logic which excludes gratuitousness. The precision, the refinement, the unity of style of each work cries out that there is something there, that the key to understanding is in our hands, and that we have to find out what it is.
François Morellet, 3/6/01
Certain artists tend to be defined by a single word, abstraction for Kandinsky, cubism for Picasso, logogram for Dotremont… chemigram for Pierre Cordier.
Claude Lorent 2007
You strongly defend the truth that art is, in itself, self-sufficient and inexhaustible
Jean-Claude Lemagny 2008
Quotes_EN