From a visit to his studio a few years ago, I remember an open, bright space, free of the clutter that often fills such places and usually overwhelms the eye. A space with large bay windows, partly covered with a blackout film, allowing light to enter and diffuse evenly. Only a slightly ajar window lets in daylight, casting a pristine ray on the floor. The impression is that of stepping into a Hammershøi painting. On simple wooden trays placed on trestles, the artist has laid out her latest works, carefully wrapped in tracing paper. On one of them, a large format is revealed, offering the viewer a subtle coloured surface whose values rise to the light only to be lost in an indescribable space. Claire Chesnier's art is defined by a duality of presence and contemplation. It is based on a relationship with time that requires the viewer to give it their own.

At first glance, nothing is apparent. Everything is to be expected. The aesthetic experience to which the artist invites us does not stem from any particular knowledge. It comes not only from being in the world and being open to it, but also from lived experience. The painter does not create images; she reveals to the light the possibility of a place, indescribable, that no reference designates, and which she invites us to experience in all its fullness. Claire Chesnier's inks assign the viewer to a form of oblivion of the world and its troubles, leading them on a quest for elsewhere. They offer a view, both in breadth and depth, of all kinds of coloured flows whose material charge defines the iconic field in layers of varying intensity.

The artist's use of ink on paper and brush instructs each of her works not in the order of writing or figures, but in that of space. Her gestures do not seek to leave a trace and do not produce any identifiable signs. She strives to create a deposit which, as the different colours are applied, forms a kind of silt in the process of gestation. If something akin to sedimentation is at work in Claire Chesnier's work, nothing seems definitively fixed; everything is in a continuous flow in which light and space are the existential components.

Workshop and artwork, container and content are inextricably linked in Claire Chesnier's work. The notion of light is the key vector, and her approach could well consist simply of opening our eyes to the beauty of the world. Like Monet, for whom she makes no secret of her admiration and whose philosopher Gaston Bachelard rightly saw what led the painter from Giverny to create the water lily pond from scratch: ‘The world wants to be seen,’ he wrote; "before it had eyes to see, the eye of the water, the great eye of the still waters, watched the flowers bloom. And it is in this reflection – who can say otherwise! – that the world first became aware of its beauty." When viewing Claire Chesnier's ink drawings, the idea of beauty – a simple beauty, like the joy we feel when we see the sun rise – immediately captures the mind. This is because there is something elemental about them, in the dual sense of an immediate, universal language and a relationship with nature. With light, in its epiphany and its extinction. With the day, in its radiance and brilliance.

The naming of each of her works in perfect correspondence with the moment of their execution establishes them in a temporality of ‘colourful ephemeris’ - as the artist puts it - and their variation in a distinctly calendar-like dynamic. Claire Chesnier's ink paintings all bear witness to the passage of time – as we all do – which gives each one a unique character. They express its fleeting nature. In their own way, they follow the moods of the atmosphere, the variations in light, the colours of the seasons and the serial mode that governs them, exalting their plastic diversity. They are made up of the never-ending flow of time and memory, with the past and present coming together under her brush in bright, colourful sensations in the light of passing daylight.

If ‘we think only in words’, painters think about the world in colours. They don't just think about it, they show it. They reveal it. "It is only then – in this almost painful breathing of language coming and going between what is given and what is withdrawn – that the experience of seeing begins to be thought about. " An absolute painter, Claire Chesnier accommodates all the days on which light reveals the world – a ray that falls and illuminates it, a break-in that allows a glimpse of it, a coloured glass that transforms it... From the light of days – all kinds of days – her works record, as the case may be, here the slow rise, there the evanescent disappearance, until they configure unnameable spaces whose secret only painting holds.

At the Chapel of the Visitation, Claire Chesnier's ink drawings compose an ode to light. They invite us to an elevation whose benefits Baudelaire sang about, in search of purification and a soaring ‘towards the luminous and serene fields’. It was while listening to the overture to Lohengrin that the poet conceived his poem, ‘freed from the bonds of gravity’ and rediscovering through memory ‘the extraordinary voluptuousness that circulates in high places’. He says he conceived "fully the idea of a soul moving in a luminous environment, an ecstasy made of voluptuousness and knowledge, hovering above and far from the natural world. " If it seems to us that something of the same intention is at work in Claire Chesnier, it is because her ink paintings resonate particularly strongly with the echo of this quatrain:

"Fly far, far away from this baneful miasma
And purify yourself in the celestial air,
Drink the ethereal fire of those limpid regions
As you would the purest of heavenly nectars."
(Charles Baudelaire)

Painting as a vehicle for mental well-being, allowing the viewer to escape to another place, infinite and indefinable.

Claire Chesnier's art is unique. Its apparent pictorial economy, its luminous serenity and its relative simplicity provoke an abundance of emotion without ever expressing it. It invades the gaze that rests upon it and surrenders to it, leading the viewer, in complete freedom and independence of spirit, to the exercise of contemplation. It offers the possibility of a place where one can imagine new horizons, take new paths, escape to new skies - or else bring back those that lie buried deep in memory. One cannot enter this work without feeling a thrill – like an existential shiver – that of having to cross over what separates us from the invisible world, from a place full of mystery. We never venture fearlessly into the unknown, but Claire Chesnier's ink paintings intoxicate us with so much light that we forget the stakes and allow ourselves to be literally carried away by them.

‘Get drunk,’ the poet recommended. ‘To avoid feeling the horrible burden of time breaking your shoulders and bending you towards the earth, you must get drunk without respite.’ But on what? On light and days, replies the painter.

Philippe Piguet, 
curator of the exhibition