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I am a contemporary artist working with optical distortion.  I use water and glass to explore how perception is shaped by memory, inheritance, and the environments that hold us. My practice traces the quiet transmissions that form us — the gestures, sensitivities, and emotional architectures passed from one generation to the next.

Interference is often my starting point.  
Refracted light, submerged imagery, and fractured surfaces create conditions where the eye must work harder, where clarity becomes unstable, and where the line between seeing and sensing begins to blur. These distortions reveal how perception is never neutral, always filtered through history and embodied experience.

Water is a recurring site of inquiry.  
It remembers and forgets, shifts between states, and offers a way to think about lineage, displacement, and the fragile ecosystems, personal and collective, that shape us. Through water, I explore the porous thresholds between consciousness and intuition, resilience and rupture.

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.

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.

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CURRENT EXHIBITION: 

 

PASSAGE

23 MAY - 31 OCTOBER 2026

MUSÉE DU PAYS DE SARREBOURG, 

FRANCE

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Mike Steib_edited.jpg

"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.

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Alexander Leinemann

"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.

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Dr Sonja Lechner

"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

www.kunstkonnex.com

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