For some time now, Claire Chesnier has been moving towards a style of painting whose only limit is the edge: all-over sequences that reinforce its visual power, super kidnapping the eye towards a full immersion in color. From there, one might think that the artist is searching, through waves, for what is known as the blue hour: that brief moment when, on the road or in the sky, the light has already faded but still condenses its fullness. The passage of the fleeting, the inscription of the sensitive. Her works are now moving towards a more stripped-down approach. The rounded shapes of yesterday, edged with white margins, are now replaced by a series of solid surfaces, in large sheets, on the wall or placed a few inches above the floor. Pits and holes in the surface: a gentle intrusion of color into the white architecture of the gallery.

“Writing comes like the wind, it is naked, it is ink, it is writing, and it passes, like nothing else passes in life, nothing more.” wrote Marguerite Duras in a small book that looks back on her practice as a writer, her links to literature, to reality, to fiction. This magnificent find of “it happens” fits like a glove—a silk glove, let's say more Zen than the Freudian instinctual it—with the way Claire Chesnier approaches her practice, made up of waiting, decision, or withdrawal.

Faced with these works, which are difficult to describe as mere drawings, she often says, “Painting should not be forced...” Everything comes to her slowly, through a series of actions: soaking the large-format paper with water, applying so much ink that the excess has to be collected in a bucket on the floor, then repeating this immersion, which will spread capriciously into vertical turbulence or gradual passages of flat tones. Being open to whatever happens, working with whatever comes. “I don't decide on the color, I wait for it. Through this slow process, I seek a form of wonder. For me, painting is an expanse that is impossible to contain...”