After the dissolution in 1951 of the CoBrA movement (1948-1951), of which he was a founding member, Corneille travelled extensively on different continents. 

Assekrem Plateau and Hoggar Mountains, Algeria, photography

In the 1960s, the artist was fascinated by nature and the dazzling light of Spain. He developed a series of abstract paintings with organic forms and an intense chromatic palette. His structured paintings borrowed their colors and materials from minerals.
From 1961, Corneille began to paint by laying his canvases on the ground. 
The rocky soil has become a garden, 1961, belongs to the famous experimental “geological” or “mineralogical” period, and more precisely to Corneille's “Spanish Period”. Our painting is a magnificent and dazzling example of this, with its red sun and brilliant colors. It evokes a relatively complex and colorful abstract landscape, but is above all a poetic translation of mineral landscapes seen from a bird's-eye view. Corneille creates a weightless universe, an aerial view of the ground, earning him the nickname “winged geologist” from his Belgian painter and poet friend Christian Dotremont (1922-1979).

Other oils from the same series are in the permanent collections of major museums such as the M.N.A.M., Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée Picasso (Antibes) and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels). 

Corneille, speaking of himself: “this earthling loves nothing so much as deserted landscapes, undecided expanses, cities of wind-worn stones, forms that we don't know whether they are born of a dream, or return to it.”