Expo Isaac Cordal: Theatre of disillusionment

A confrontation with the work of the Galician-born, Brussels-based artist Isaac Cordal – whose Cement Eclipses have been appearing on the streets of major European cities since 2006 – is always a confrontation with the self. A self upon which, you know, the daily maelstrom beats down so constantly that you might forget who you are or can be, and that, you hope, shows more resilience than Isaac Cordal's lost tribe of little cement statuettes of riot police, homeless people, and mighty yet melancholy businessmen.

Does that seem a bit harsh? It is. And it should be. 100 metres hurdles, the most recent, in-situ work by Isaac Cordal, places a black athlete and a favela hut on a piste, separated from each other by several barbed wire fences. Is that too far from the truth? Do we not sometimes feel the isolating effect of what, while it purports to be progress, we describe as a "smartphone" and "social media" (see Isolated in the Modern Outdoors)? Do we sometimes not think that this progress is barely aligned with societal concerns (see The Family)? That fundamental rights like education are increasingly forced to rely on the demands of the market (see the impressive The School)? Perhaps these arrays of mental and physical walls (Gaza, Calais, Trump) serve primarily to screen the reflection of our own collective failure?

It is the hard reality of that illusion that Isaac Cordal breaks down in his solo show at La Médiatine. By observing, reading the signs of the times, and by painting a tragic portrait of a society defined by submissiveness, individualism, and the inculcated fantasies of uniformity. His theatre of disillusionment often cuts to the core, but stirs the heart all the more. In Mimetism for example, he presents a penetrating representation of our vanity and dreams. Or in American Dream and The Reader, two homeless people give a searing indictment of the things we tolerate as collateral damage and at the same time show us what we, rodents in the rat race, have lost: it's time for introspection, reflection, and poetry. We do have a choice. And at the very least, art is a catalyst to reawakening us to it.

Isaac Cordal: La comédie humaine, > 9/10, La Médiatine