Biography

The artist Corinne Verbaet - who works under the pseudonym ARTNOSE -
is self-taught, talented, ingenious and driven by the need for perfection.
She has developed her own style for the application of the collage technique.

A collage is an artwork made of snippets of paper, fabric or other materials that are attached to a carrier or somehow processed into a painting.
In her collages, the artist utilises numerous elements which she has culled from various magazines, the internet and other publications.
She applies these to a carrier and accentuates the work with acrylic paint.
In this technique and in spirit, she is a descendant of DADA and artists like Kurt Schwitters.
Dadaism was a literary-artistic movement that evolved out of the likenamed magazine published in 1915 in Zurich and was founded by the Cabaret Voltaire to satirize the cultural and political situation of that time and challenge the complacent dishonesty of artistic and political conventions with bravado, irony and humour.

In a sense, Flemish artists, such as the graphic artist Paul Joostens and the poet Paul Van Ostaijen were also influenced by this movement. The significance of Dadaism and the techniques that the Dadaists developed, including the collage, were not fully recognized until after World War II with the advent of such trends as Pop Art.

Artnose also satirizes dictators, presidents, government leaders, politicians, kings and queens, princes and princesses, the Pope and corporate bosses. Her collages are brimming with irony. Artnose’s tone, which can be comical, ironic and even cynical, makes the dark social-political reality that they portray palatable.
In this sense, her work is closely aligned with the oeuvre of the Iceland-born and Paris-based and graphic artist Erro. His work, influenced by Pop Art, mainly addresses social-political themes.
His collages and posters are often construed in ironic-realistic fashion. Artnose does not lend any significance to the titles of her works.
My brief introduction here is only one of many possible interpretations, by the way.
It’s now up to you, the beholder, to interpret the work. Was it not the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco who wrote in his book “Opera Aperta” (The Open Work) that a painting or a work of art could only be meaningful if it is open to several different interpretations?
This is an oeuvre where aesthetics and social responsibility meet and irony and vulnerability come together.

Ernest Van Buynder, Chairman of the Friends of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp September 2018.