Corneilles pictures are a mirror. They express sensual motifs where the woman, the cat and the bird often are depicted against a deeply red, dark blue or lemon coloured sky.
The pictures reflect our inner visions of passion, delightfulness, and beauty. These reflections in Corneille open up a mirror that faces towards a fantasy landscape where the woman and the bird are in symbiosis. The woman represent beauty and voluptuousness and the bird symbolize freedom and strength.
Corneille van Beverloo was born in 1922 in Liège, Belgium, by Dutch parents. After his school years he studied drawing at the Arts Academy in Amsterdam during the years 1940-43. As a painter he is autodidact.
The first exhibition was shown 1946 in the Dutch city of Groningen together with artists from the Dutch Experimental group Reflex.
Corneille came to Paris for the first time in 1946, and immediately he felt at home in the pulsating art metropolis. Together with Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Dotremont and Constant, Corneille founded the COBRA-group in Paris 1948. Many other artists, poets and architects joined the group; among them the Swedish artists C-O Hultén, Max Walter Svanberg and Anders Österlin.
During his travels around the world Corneille has got impulses and inspiration to new works of art. Especially the African culture has influenced and enriched his work, and during his journeys to Africa the interest for African art aroused and made him a devoted collector of African sculptures and masks.
Ever since the debut in Groningen half a century ago, Corneille has taken part in hundreds exhibitions at galleries and museums all over the world.
Fascinated by Corneille and the joy of life in his painting Siwert Bergstrom went to see the artist in Paris 1976, where they met in a sidewalk cafeteria by Rue de Clignancourt. Corneille promised to produce a sequence of engravings for the gallery, at that time called Galleri Kända Målare and situated in Jönköping. This was the beginning of a fruitful friendship and work fellowship that resulted in a multitude of books and graphical editions as well as innumerable exhibitions in Sweden and Europe.
Despite his eighty years old, one can still see the child in Corneille. He is always on the way. "Corneille tojours en route", published 1991 is exactly the title of one of the books edited by the gallery. Another publication is "Elles belles mortelles" which gives shape to the erotic theme put in opposing relation to the death dance motifs.
Corneille makes an inventory of reality, both the inner and the external. The range of colours in his pictures span over a wide spectrum, the red meets the green, the yellow meets the blue. There is an energetic movement forward in his pictures.
The motifs that have streamed from his brush trough the years form an endless chain of pictures depicting animals and humans in an continuous process of development. Corneille is always on his way.
Johan Persson 9 januari 2002