Karen Joubert Cordier

Karen Joubert Cordier (born 29 August 1954) is a French-American artist born in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Upon completion of her studies at the Academy Charpentier in Paris, she was counseled by a famous art dealer, Daniel Cordier. Her first show was a great success at the Gallery Beaubourg in Paris, and was followed by a permanent exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Museum.

Art critic Bernard Lamarche-Vadel (1949–2000): "At first sight, Joubert-Cordier's paintings have only one recurring subject: the unbridled vegetation of nature falling prey to unlimited repetition, dissemination, proliferation. This means that each composition originates from a serial process transversing the painting and which the painting is only a detail of. And the famous disturbing Freudian strangeness emanating from each work has no other motive but this situation where we are facing the framework of a process unfolding outside all dimension. If, therefore, the ordinate accumulation of details in a painting which itself is but a detail serves first as a purely visual provocation, viewed again, Joubert-Cordier's paintings accomplish an original, exotic, and unexpected synthesis of modern tradition especially. Pointillism, surrealism, all-over expressionism, all the principles of the great movements of the century are convoked, collected, in order to draw out the image of a digital labyrinth. Because, here, vision seems to me to be but an inductive threshold, "aperitif" if I may say so, of a sensorial space very rarely utilized in the history of painting, that of the Touch. This so rare sensation is discernable in the complementarity of the formal characteristic of the works and of the Story of these same works. This great proliferating vegetation screened framed in a series of sites, and details therefore of an infinite process, is first of all the product of a proliferation of marks, touches, streaks. And the eye convoked in Joubert-Cordier's paintings as the synthetic sum of marks, in identifying the sumptuous microcellular carpet, identifies at the same time the procedural passage of the repetition of touches, rather than of the painted, the brushed. From which follows, considering these paintings and their disturbing strangeness: that it is not so much the visual aspect of this flora which inspires strangeness; the coherent and masterly application of touches; the quality of the tones, the organic unit of the ensemble, on the contrary, confers upon these works a great visual savour. But beyond the global visual threshold, I well believe that it is the spectator's hand which is, through these paintings, grabbed, the unconscious hand seized by the delicate touch of these great digital surfaces. It is not the eye here that is in danger, but through the recourse to vision, it is the body that is aimed at, the hand first, on this score of teeth, these stringy mosses, these carnivorous flowers, this vegetal cancer. This painting sees itself on the scale of the forbidden it forces on touch, and by extension, on the body."