Thierry De Cordier
NADA
3 April—29 September 2025
Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy
Fondazione Prada presents the site-specific monographic show NADA by Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier, expressively conceived for the three-part Cisterna building at its Milan venue. Running from 3 April to 29 September 2025, the exhibition brings together ten large-scale paintings from the so-called NADA series realized from 1999 to 2024. The first works of this series stem from the explicit intention to erase the crucifixion image. The resulting works are no longer a form of negative painting but an ultimate attempt to experience the “grandeur of nothingness” as expressed by the artist.
As De Cordier recalls, “My first black painting (now destroyed) is the result of an intention: to abolish the image of Christ on the Cross, albeit in a demonstrative way. At no point did I think about making a great painting. My sole objective was to symbolically annihilate a deeply rooted Christian image. That was all it was about at the time. Then one day, while immersed in a biography of the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, I happened upon the following passage: ‘No emphasis, but absolute rigor. The search for the NADA (Nothing) of the Cross; the concern for the only thing necessary…’ Suddenly, a vision arose within me, significantly deepening the meaning of these paintings, by freeing them from the restrictive interpretation in which they were trapped. As they were freed from the original negation (which had prompted me to paint them), they gradually evolved towards the ultimate achievement in painting, i.e. the sublime.”
Thierry De Cordier’s ten canvases are almost monochromatic but can only be interpreted as purely abstract or conceptual works. As the series’ title suggests, they constitute a black pictorial space that opens onto nothingness. NADA is also the inscription that appears in some paintings in the position of the historical acronym INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum), which, according to the Gospels, was affixed to the Cross of Christ and represented by many artists in their depictions of the crucifixion.
Showcasing this group of ten works from the NADA series in the Cisterna building is a deliberate decision. Comprising three exhibition rooms that extend vertically and illuminated by light that filters through large windows in the buildings’ top section, this post-industrial architecture evokes an ecclesial or sacred space in terms of size and conformation. De Cordier’s design, with a structure in each room, creates the impression of a monumental triptych with the side doors open. The large paintings are hung in the center of the long side of these structures, while the lateral modules also have niches on the shorter sides to display smaller works. A bench in front of his colossal canvas Gran Nada (2007-2012), located in the central room of the Cisterna, serves as a point of observation and contemplation, marking the fulcrum of the entire installation.
In his essay for the publication that accompanies this exhibition, part of the Quaderno series published by Fondazione Prada, Belgian critic and scholar Bart Verschaffel points out that “the challenge and strength of this cycle of deceptively ‘monochrome’ Andachtsbilder rests on the fact that, ultimately, it makes no difference whether one looks here with open eyes or with the eyes closed.” An illustrated insert, including selected notes by Thierry De Cordier, completes the publication.
Thierry De Cordier (b. 1954, Ronse, Belgium) currently lives and works in Ostend, Belgium. Desolate landscapes, seascapes and mountains are among the themes that interest him. On the one hand, indebted to ancient Chinese landscape painting, his paintings also capture the essential qualities of the landscape and light of Northern Europe. The grey skies and dark seas in his works evoke melancholy, with the most dramatic scenes being those in which waves and mountainous cliffs fuse to embody the forces of nature within a single primal image. The subject of God and the definition or non-definition of God is at the core of his artistic practice in recent years.