October 2024
When Avery told me she wanted to call this show Illuminations, I immediately thought of Arthur Rimbaud’s famous poetry collection of the same title. Rimbaud wielded his words like weapons, slicing through to the soul, carving open sensation so all that is inside may flow outside. In a letter to Paul Demeny, Rimbaud describes what it means to be a poet:
“A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself… For he attains the unknown!”
The title Illuminations is an apt description of the enlightenment Cordray has experienced over the past few years. I asked if she would consider herself a poet, to which her reply was an emphatic “No!” and a laugh. I have long been fascinated by her insistent removal of herself, her “genius,” from the larger narrative of her work. She is not remotely troubled by the lack of self-presentation or identity so familiar to the archetypal artist— the ego that possesses and takes credit for the instance of creation. Whether or not Corday is a poet is not really a question; the works she creates are poetic. The context of how she relates, or unrelates, to her work is a crack that allows us to slip in and experience what is playing out on the canvas. The works gasp and scream out sensation, paint bursting outward onto the cold, unrelenting landscape of a canvas, excreting the experience they were forged in. The wrestling forms are traversing a landscape unknown and altogether collective, resulting in an uncanny mixture of nostalgia and repulsion. To view these paintings is to be so full one moment and then completely hollowed out the next.
For Cordray, the act of expression is a spitting out of all sensation, creating relief through a total loss of self— a disintegration of what is recognizable. The finished work is where an invisible wall is erected and the artist, with nothing left to give, lays her brushes down at the end of a tiresome battle and walks away. “The work is nothing;the act of working, everything.” (Arthur Symons, “The Symbolist Movement in Literature”). Action and desire are the only true principles here.
Cordray spent many years rejecting her true artistic impulses in deference to monsters called anxiety and conformity. In Illuminations, she refuses to make nice with the monsters. Daring to become lost in action, she rips it all open,revealing everything that is hidden and frantically nailing it all to the canvas with fervor. Thinking is outwitted by presence. When I read the poetry of Rimbaud, or look at one of Avery’s paintings, there is a shiver, something felt on a cellular level, and at the core of that feeling is something indescribable attempting to be described, like trying time and again to scratch a traveling itch.
Drawings
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