Isabelle Cornaro's solo exhibition at Today Art Museum opens with her early photographic series Savane autour de Bangui et le fleuve Utubangui, created in 2007.  In this series, Cornaro positions her mother’s jewelry and trinkets on wooden panels. The curved forms of those jewelry and trinkets intertwine with the wood grain to evoke the natural scenery of the Central African Republic, where Cornaro partly spent her childhood.  While attempting to question the boundaries between the everyday objects, the ornamental, and the artistic, Cornaro also contemplates the legacy of Western colonization and Africa’s resource exploitation through the notion of “landscape”. This period lays the groundwork for Cornaro’s ongoing exploration into the emotional, societal, and historical dimensions of landscape, hinting at the inception of her later Paysages installation series. 

The two new installations unveiled for this exhibition, titled Paysages XV and Paysages XVI, stem from the artist's renowned Paysages series. With an academic background in art history, Cornaro reignited her fascination with the principles of arrangement, composition, and assemblage intrinsic to classical Western painting, reminiscent of her earlier exploration of her mother's jewelry. She further recognizes that these concerns lie beyond the pictorial frame to the storage and display mechanisms in Western museums. The perspective within the frame and the position of the audience are both matters of perspective, which is essentially a matter of "authority": these choices determine what, where and how we look. Through exhaustive scrutiny of perspectives and compositions inside the paintings, Cornaro undertakes a radical and meticulous refinement. Departing from the confines of the two-dimensionality of traditional paintings, she employs three-dimensional installations to immerse the viewer directly within the landscape, granting them to explore myriad perspectives and wander at will.

The Reproductions series delves deeply into the realm of image reproduction, a theme echoed in the artist's films and the seamless transitions among various mediums. In Cornaro's films, familiar elements from her Landscape installations can be spotted. The exhibition also showcases five large-scale paintings from Reproductions, which depict enlarged stills from the same films, reminiscent of the history of abstraction. Towards the exhibition's conclusion, a series titled Séquence, prompting contemplation on the concept of “seriality”, wherein each piece contributes to a broader imagery. As these works are arranged and combined, they gradually unfold into a panoramic vista, underscoring similar principles from image scanning and film editing. Notably, for Cornaro, the image serves as another means of “casting” reality. Through this exhibition, audiences are invited to immersively traverse the landscape of contemporary reality, wherein Cornaro freely roams and experiments across diverse media, intertwining objects and imagery with ease.