I am a contemporary artist working with optical distortion.
I work from the belief that human relationships are delicate, not weak. Their fragility is an urgent threshold — a space where understanding becomes possible when we approach one another with care.
My visual language began in South Africa, where I first used reclaimed glass from old doors as a lens and a disruptor. Since relocating to France, this research has expanded in dialogue with regions shaped by centuries of glassmaking, deepening my engagement with fragility, transparency, opacity, and the tension between surface and depth.
By disrupting automatic perception through colour fields and optical devices such as pixelated glass, I create works that ask viewers to slow down, to look closely, and to look again. This repeated act of attention echoes the way we must listen to others: with patience, respect, and a willingness to be changed by what we encounter. Through these visual thresholds, my work explores how both seeing and relating become acts of care.
Water is a recurring site of inquiry. It remembers and forgets, shifts between states, and offers a way to think about the fragile ecosystems that shape us. Through water, I explore the porous thresholds between consciousness and intuition.
Across painting, installation, and lens‑based work, I return to a central question:
What lies beneath the surface of what we think we know : about ourselves, about each other, about the worlds we inherit?
My practice is an ongoing attempt to look again, to look differently, and to make visible the subtle forces that shape how we see and how we are seen.
CURRENT EXHIBITION:
PASSAGE
23 MAY - 31 OCTOBER 2026
MUSÉE DU PAYS DE SARREBOURG,
FRANCE
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"We fell in love with Cornè's work at an art fair in New York a few years ago. It is the centrepiece of our home here in New York."
Mike Steib.
Collector and former CEO of Artsy.
"Theron's images are a materialized pause of perpetual blur in the otherwise hurried search for clarity in the mirages of the digital world....Cornè Theron's art is a possible means of recognizing, with the help of art, what potentially lies behind the superficiality of things."
Dr Alexander Leinenmann,
Sprengel Museum Hannover,
Germany.
"Summer, the great break from the world, invites us to free moments from the flow of time, to pause in order to perceive the unspectacular, the unstaged, the unformed for what it actually is: unmissable. The blurriness in the artist's oeuvre is hence an offer to reorient our vision."
Dr Sonja Lechner M.A.,
Art historian,
Curator