Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Robbie Cornelissen

Terra Nova

Animation | mp4 | noir et blanc | 17:10 | Pays-Bas | 2021

The film’s opening shot shows a bird’s eye view of what could be the earth, or are we looking at a drawing? We could say that after this intro, individual scenes appear to follow one another in an associative way, it shows elements and processes in a rapidly changing world on earth. The words ‘Absence’ and ‘Presence’ appear and flicker in the darkness like neon signs. We look at this play of creating and taking away, of drawing and erasing in the stop motion technique, that brings us in the transformation process of different scenes. At the end of the first part of the film a spaceship set off on a flight towards infinity. The vanishing point, the limit of the drawing’s perspective is our destination. The second part of the film we are in the cosmos and look at the development of a floating architecture, like a space station. This station clusters to its essence and sett off to a planet. In the final scene a human figure, an astronaut appears, stands up and walks towards an exit and dives, to disappear into the extra-terrestrial, floating and circling alone in the black mass.

Robbie Cornelissen ( Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1954) graduated In Biology at the University in Utrecht, and graduated in Fine Art at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He was teaching fine art at Artez Academy in Arnhem until 2020. Robbie Cornelissen (1954) is one of the Netherlands leading contemporary draughtsmen. Cornelissen made his name with virtuoso pencil drawings of futuristic interiors and urban landscapes in which memory and fantasy come together.The complex, vertiginous pieces draw the spectator into an illusionistic space that does not seem confined to the paper. Cornelissen is a kind of a researcher in the field of drawing. He is well known for his animation movies and public events around drawing. His animation project The Black Room was the winner of the special jury price of The Holland Animation Festival in 2015. In 2019 Cornelissen was working as a guest curator and artist for the exhibition ‘The Line Up’ , an exhibition around drawing with 100 artists for The Centraal Museum Utrecht. In 2022 Cornelissen made a solo exhibition ‘Terra Nova’ In the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany about the connection of his drawings and animation movies.