Amid the energy and exchange of miart 2025, Thierry De Cordier’s NADA offers a counterpoint of calm. Presented by Fondazione Prada during Milan’s 29th international modern and contemporary art fair—taking place from 4 to 6 April 2025 at Allianz MiCo—the exhibition unfolds as a quiet repudiation of spectacle. Installed within the Cisterna, a triadic post-industrial structure whose verticality and filtered light evoke ecclesial architecture, NADA brings together ten monumental black paintings created between 1999 and 2025. Together, they form an austere arrangement of black that resists interpretation as much as it commands reverence. In this act of disciplined negation, De Cordier approaches painting not as the assertion of vision, but as its withdrawal. The result is an encounter with what he terms “the grandeur of nothingness.” (1)
The first of these works, now destroyed, was painted in order to symbolically erase the image of Christ on the Cross. This was not an act of desecration but of exorcism—a ritual gesture aimed at undoing centuries of iconographic dominance. “My sole objective,” (1) De Cordier recalls, “was to symbolically annihilate a deeply rooted Christian image.” (1) And yet, as with all sincere acts of destruction, something else remained. In the wake of this erasure, De Cordier found himself confronted not with an empty canvas, but with the possibility of sublimity. A line from the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross—“the search for the NADA (Nothing) of the Cross” (1)—provided the aperture. From that moment, these paintings ceased to function as negations and began to operate as revelations.
These works are compelling in their resistance to being reduced to conceptual postures or strict formal abstraction. While they gesture toward the monochrome traditions of the twentieth century—those stark reductions to a single field of black that once aimed to transcend image entirely—De Cordier’s canvases do not offer purity or closure. Unlike the flat transcendentalism of Black Square, Kazimir Malevich, (1915) or the attempted formal terminality of Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, De Cordier’s surfaces are dense, weathered, and gravitational. Their matte blackness is not absence, but atmosphere. As the eye adjusts, forms begin to surface, not as images, but as impressions—like breath on cold glass. In their overwhelming restraint, these works become not just visual fields, but conditions for presence. There is, paradoxically, a warmth to them.
In some paintings, the word NADA is inscribed where the acronym INRI would traditionally appear—an inversion that is both semiotic and spiritual. This subtle intervention unseats centuries of religious semiotics with quiet force. Rather than reimagine the crucifixion, De Cordier removes it, leaving only the space where it once was. The black canvas becomes a veil over the sacred wound, a relic of absence.
If these paintings enact a retreat, it is not from the world but into a different register of being. In this, I can’t avoid Simone Weil’s concept of decreation (2)—the act of making oneself nothing so that the divine might appear. For Weil, attention is the purest form of prayer: an emptied posture of receptivity before that which exceeds comprehension. De Cordier’s canvases, too, require this kind of attention. They do not speak, they wait. They do not impose meaning; they ask for a quiet witness. The act of painting here is not an aesthetic assertion but a philosophical one: a turn toward humility, austerity, and time.
Gracefully at odds with the moment, I can’t help but take pleasure in these works being shown at Fondazione Prada—as the city swells with fair energy, and relentless gallery-hopping. These paintings, by contrast, do not circulate easily. They resist reproduction. They offer no bold political spectacle, no instant gratification. They stand instead as refusals—of distraction, of speed, though perhaps not entirely of capital.
In an art world increasingly dominated by spectacle, NADA reads as a quiet form of resistance. De Cordier’s paintings stand as monuments to a different temporality—one of slowness, rigour, and restraint. They point to the possibility that what is unseen may be most deeply felt.
As Saint John of the Cross wrote, and De Cordier repeats, “no emphasis, only absolute rigor.” (1) In this rigorous silence, we do not find nihilism, but the possibility of grace. NADA is not the absence of faith—it is its dark mirror, its other side. And in that darkness, something begins to emerge: not revelation in the traditional sense, but an aperture, an opening.
(1) Fondazione Prada. (2025). NADA: Thierry De Cordier. https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/nada/?
(2) Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford, Routledge, 1963.
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Thierry De Cordier (b. 1954, Ronse, Belgium) is an artist, poet, and philosopher who lives and works in Ostend. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Passe-montagne, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Iconotextures, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; Ensemblematic, S.M.A.K., Ghent; Landschappen, BOZAR, Brussels; and Drawings, Centre Pompidou, Paris. He represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and participated in The Encyclopaedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Clara Bruni is a writer based between London and Barcelona.
