The surface is smooth, without irregularities, carefully circumscribed by a hexagon cutting like a blade whose upper edge – blunt, indecisive and blurred – forms a border through which the gaze enters and exits the body of the painting at will. It is a painting of acceleration and slow outpouring, a percolation of colour from bottom to top, dammed by impassable oblique boundaries. I think of Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, of the imminence of dissection, of the opening of the gaze. No doubt this pictorial blade will have helped to open my eyes, pointing to the ambivalence of the surgical cut made in the colour, also playing with the feeling of observing only part of the expanse, as in the delimited frame of an optical instrument or from an observatory. What appeared to me to be a muddy brown is revealed in the subtlety of a complex chromatic mixture, in the layering of a succession of sometimes almost invisible gradations and streaks, in a patient rise towards the orange glow of a horizon light. In this painting, as in all of Claire Chesnier's paintings, there is a risk of mud(1) that painters know well, with which she deliberately composes to the ultimate limit, to the irreversible extinction of colour through successive layers of liquid tones. It is a painting submerged like a wave by its own undertow: In this submersion, the wonder of colour emerges, where the sublime percolates on the edge of desolation.

The painting rests on the threshold of memories of vast expanses, twilight skies, atmospheric modulations, recollections of dawns barely broken or nocturnal moors still bathed in the distant, flickering glow of a dying sun. This painting describes nothing of the world, and its purpose can only be to dislocate, separate and dismantle the world, referring to reality only by pure analogy. This painting takes the world as its witness, folding it like origami within the pictorial space constrained by its edges, emptied of all narrative and all influence by words (Claire Chesnier evokes a ‘mourning of language’ in front of the painting). The painting is contained in a sharp form like the blade of a scalpel, one of whose edges has been blunted so that gentle sensations can flow. It proceeds from a reduction – in the gastronomic sense of the term, as one evokes the reduction of a juice by evaporation to a form of quintessence – in the way in which assent is given to colour as an event, as an occurrence and as an intensity to be recovered, after the fact, a sensitive perception accessing a power of elevation towards the atmospheric. Verticality, adjusted to the proportions of the body, tilts in the lower part towards the horizontality of a tremolo, a stripe of chromatic gradation cut sharply by a blade that evokes for me the severed sun from Guillaume Apollinaire's poem(2), which he had initially written as ‘rising sun cut off,’ in an image of the decapitation of the sun.

What I see in this painting: a dawn cut cleanly by a sharp blade or by the soul of a cuckoo with a sharp beak – for it is also the name of a bird whose throat is delicately scarred with a scarlet red mark. This painting opens up to the world and to the senses, in a constantly repeated focus, a blindness, a lucidity, a succession of clairvoyance, abandonment, loss, recovery – as we sometimes say, recovering sight after temporary blindness.

1– The expression is by Claire Chesnier.
2– Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone, in Alcools, 1913.