MUDHONEY

Claire Chesnier & Denis Laget

JANUARY 6 - MARCH 13 2022

Curator & text : Jean-Charles Vergne

GALLERY ETC - PARIS

"Painting, if it is to resurface unexpectedly, should be unassuming, allusive, memory-resistant, resonant, suffused with afterglow: outpourings and downfalls, at turns surging and burrowing, a weft of lights shining onto the paint and out from its organic core, and there is always the risk of achieving nothing but mud. The risk of mud for Claire Chesnier is an ink-overload saturating the paper’s physical capacity, leaving no room for touch-ups. She uses ink for her large-scale paintings, which in their size and verticality roughly match her own body. The surface of her paintings on paper is smooth, unruffled, bounded by its edges and rimmed by a frame – nothing ever spills over, nothing divulges the beginning or end of a gesture. The risk of mud(1) implies the extinction of colour, swamped by itself and by the cumulative irreversible nature of hues: the unilateral submersion of colour through liquid layering; however, she attains that elusive realm where the sublime hovers at the margins of dereliction. [...]

Claire Chesnier explains that any abstraction in her practice is après-coup or malgré tout, which is to say in retrospect or in spite of everything. In other words, it’s all about gesture, momentum, interaction with a fleeting substance that overflows the gesture, soaks the paper and gives rise to a "slender depth of colours and time", a veil one may enter, at once immersed and held at bay. This array of colours resembles shimmering water, chalky dermis, glimmering metal, and literally summons the viewer. The surface beckons one’s gaze to plunge – after the deliquescent mud of time and creation, after the mingled colours have dried – into a stream of subtle chromatic variations of pictorial phosphenes, of slow tremors accompanied by fluctuating daylight. This may be abstraction, but an abstraction that does not detach or pry us away from reality and sensation: quite the contrary. In the words of Giorgio Morandi: "For me, nothing is abstract. I believe that nothing is more surreal, nothing is more abstract than reality." To view Claire Chesnier’s paintings is to ride on the wings of duration and light in the clasp of passing time and incarnated painting, bringing new meaning to the notion of viewing: a revelation of the perceptible sensorial world, an endlessly reiterated focus, bedazzlement, lucidity, a sequence of clairvoyance, withdrawal, loss, recovery – the way sight is recovered after transient blindness."

Jean-Charles Vergne (extract)
(1) the expression is from Claire Chesnier

Galerie ETC
28, rue Saint Claude
75003 Paris
www.galerie-etc.com