DRAWING ON DON QUIXOTE at National Opera House, Wexford
DRAWING ON DON QUIXOTE
18 October - 3 November 2019, National Opera House, Wexford
7 - 10 November 2019, VUE Art Fair, RHA, Dublin
7 - 10 November 2019, VUE Art Fair, RHA, Dublin
19 January - 29 March 2020, Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin [The exhibition was closed on the 15th of March 2020 as the country was preparing to go into lockdown 1 due to the Covid pandemic. We decided to close on that day alongside museums and public galleries].
Group Show
Artists:
Annika Berglund, Aisling Conroy, Hugh Cummins, John Fitzsimons, Jordi Forniés, Conrad Frankel, David Fox, Claire Halpin, Nickie Hayden, Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Miriam McConnon, Sheila Naughton, Yanny Petters, Kelly Ratchford, Vicky Smith
and Susanne Wawra
Initial launch: Friday 18 October, 6 pm at National Opera House, Wexford.
Guest speaker: Dr Mary Kelly, Chairwoman of Wexford Festival Opera
Last edition of the show:
Opening on Sunday 19 January 2020, 3pm, Olivier Cornet Gallery, 3 Great Denmark Street, Dublin 1.
All welcome. Remarks by Olivier Cornet, gallerist and curator of the show.
All welcome. Remarks by Olivier Cornet, gallerist and curator of the show.
The Olivier Cornet Gallery is delighted to present this group exhibition by kind invitation of the committee of Wexford Opera Festival and in the context of Massenet’s ‘Don Quichotte’ featuring in this year’s festival.
Examples of art inspiring art down the ages abound but it is particularly obvious with ‘the world’s first modern novel’: Jules Massenet's ‘Don Quichotte’, like so many other dramatized versions of the story, relates only indirectly to the great novel by Miguel de Cervantes. The opera in five acts was composed to a French libretto by Henri Caïn, itself inspired by ‘Le chevalier de la longue figure’, a play by the poet Jacques Le Lorrain first performed in Paris in 1904.
Massenet's comédie-héroïque, was first performed on 19 February 1910 at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo (France). The French composer was born in 1842 in Saint-Etienne (Loire), a city where most members of gallerist/curator Olivier Cornet’s immediate family were also born and where he himself completed his secondary education, a determining factor when choosing one of this year’s operas for his artists’ response.
The other appeal was the rich palette of contemporary themes in Cervantes’ novel as well as the art-inspiring-art connections: from Alexandre Dumas’ Three musketeers, through Picasso to more recently Salman Rushdie’s novel. Themes such as the quest for truth and justice in this era of fake news, notoriety and the accession to powerful positions by the underdogs -or perceptions thereof in the current re-emergence of populists-, the explorations of the troubled inner-self, love and how we relate to one another. The resilience of the individual (through desperate acts at times) against our modern-day malevolent giants, to the rallying to just causes and the emergence of the real heroes and heroines, have also provided the Olivier Cornet Gallery artists with a rich tapestry of materials.
‘Drawing on Don Quixote’ will also be presented at VUE Art Fair 2019 (RHA, Dublin, 7-10 November 2019) and at the Olivier Cornet Gallery in January-March 2020. The final edition of this thematic group at the gallery will include more works than shown in the other two venues.
Reviews:
Wexford People, 15 October 2019
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