Commissioned by the Musée du Pays de Sarrebourg, artist Cornè Theron created this work for
the 50th anniversary of the installation of Chagall’s La Paix.
The art installation Passage brings together two works that explore the threshold between appearance and disappearance, while quesrioning our own role in contributing to peace.
MEDITERRANEAN MELT
Mediterranean Melt: Unstable Paradise
explores the fragile realities we construct around places of leisure. Developed from photographs taken along the beaches of the Côte d'Azur, the series is transformed through vintage French optical glass, introducing subtle distortions that unsettle the image.
IT`S NOT SERIOUS, IS IT?
AUGUST 2026
It's not serious, is it? begins as an oil painting, already fractured through a glass filter. From there, the image is rephotographed again and again. It explores the quiet inheritance of responsibility. Through this installation; the work asks whether peace; care and attention are ever truly passed on, or simply deferred.
Nymphéas grew from a very quiet place. Its earliest impulse lies in childhood memories of the artist’s grandmother’s lily pond on a Free State farm — a place of stillness and constant movement. That early experience of water remained, not as a fixed image, but as a way of understanding the world.
Cornè Theron is a contemporary artist working with optical distortion and she works 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.
Across painting, installation, and lens‑based work, she returns 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? Her 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.
Her visual language began in South Africa, where she 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 her 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, her 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, she explores the porous thresholds between consciousness and intuition.
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