The dawn draws a misty smoke above the rivers and lakes. It is a veil that comes between the rising sun and its reflection spreading through the surrounding air. It is its own heat that makes it impossible to see at the moment of its birth. We never know what begins at its beginning. Every cause within us is recapitulated and fictitious. We never know what ends at the moment of its true end. Every farewell is a word we want to believe concludes. Yet it neither begins nor ends anything."

(Pascal Quignard, Les ombres errantes (The wandering shadows))

Claire Chesnier settles there, in the realm of dawns described by Pascal Quignard, a place that has no name, no stable geography, nothing to precisely define it, on no map or in any world. This place is unfathomable; a place on the edge, a place of shadows, a place of mist, of immaterial presence.

It is precisely in this boundless place that she decides to settle, in order to create powerful forms that will all ultimately contain within them the founding indistinctness, the non-time that creates a bridge between past and present, ghostly memory and flight forward. The forms assert themselves as if to express a power, a false power no doubt, one that believes it can capture the dawn, the day that breaks after night. But inside, somewhere in the seemingly massive form, hides a fragment of dawn, a light veil that settles despite everything. The apparition is fleeting, and the eye that looks at it must be careful, for it is not necessarily visible or recognisable. Everything can happen in a second: the dazzled eyelid opens onto something it will never see in the same way twice in a row, like when we open our eyes in the morning to discover a world that can never be the same as the one we knew before. We cannot see Claire Chesnier's paintings twice in the same way, just as she cannot reproduce the same gesture twice or experience the same moment twice.

The moment of dawn, the moment of dawn. At this precise moment, there is indeed a misty fog on the surface of which two moments that cannot meet merge: dusk and dawn. Rimbaud says he once embraced this dawn in the purity of a summer kiss, emerging from a night of dark and deep savagery. For dawn does indeed have a body, flesh that one can try to embrace: an ‘immense body’, Rimbaud writes. The immense body is very difficult to embrace with both arms. That is why each painting is an attempt at an embrace. Claire Chesnier paints large formats, at her height, at the height of what her arms can grasp in a single gesture. And with each painting recommenced, a new dawn is captured in its serious and smiling fragility.

The colours used combine and ultimately create layers of colour that are impossible to describe in words: some layers are of unquantifiable thickness, while others, like spikes or sirens, reach out to the viewer's retina and try to draw them into their depths. In many paintings, there are unsuspected charms and spells. These forces that rise and fall are like magic spells: here, the depth of a midnight blue descends, falling abruptly like a curtain of night; while next to it, the brightness of an orange-yellow is gradually disturbed by a red climbing in ascending streaks. Some paintings have something toxic about them, like waters polluted by phosphorescent chemicals, modern alluvium. The colours are murky. Some purples are purplish. Some greens are greenish. Auroras are not always gentle landscapes. They can also carry within them the terrors of childhood and the night before.

Nothing would be possible without the pallor of the blank page, which will soon drink up the ink until it can drink no more, like an alcoholic drinking every last drop. The sheet waits to be covered in its centre. And the edges, with their ever-changing contours, remain white, virgin, like a casket welcoming a concentration of life. The blank page drinks in the multiple inks mixed with transparent water; the water opens up the space of this sheet, and, through dilution, the inks reveal their changing colours. The opposing materials enter into dialogue: water, ink and paper undertake a new exploration, revealing a visibility in motion.

The shapes we see here are anything but geometric: they resemble fragmented crystals, as if they were all part of a larger whole that, by bringing all the fragments together, manages to circumscribe the area of the auroras. Gilles Deleuze, writing about cinema and following Bergson, introduces the concept of the ‘crystal image’, an image like a crystal of time, a place of adequacy between the actual and the virtual, between the perception of our action in the present and the untimely emergence of a fabric of memory that interferes with the immediacy of what is, here and now. Claire Chesnier's work is thus crystalline: her present gesture is constantly leaving a trace; a trace that bears within it the fruit of an action in the present, but which also brings together the dark layers of colour, and finally anticipates the future of dawns that are sure to come.

What we see in these paintings is the veil of time, the deposit of a profound substance, whose strength lies in being both a horizon and an immensity.

 

Léa Bismuth
in, L’aire des aurores, Ed. Art Collector, Paris, 2014