“For a dreamer who remains faithful to the clairvoyance of dreams, one of the functions of plants is to produce shade, just as cuttlefish produce ink.” This quote from Bachelard sheds light on the series of paintings, works created in several stages as the ink settles. The poetic power of Claire Chesnier's paintings lies in the halo effects combined with high pigment density. This ability to spread darkness and light on paper evokes Henri Michaux's Rideau des rêves (Curtain of Dreams). What could be more elusive than a dream drowned in ink? As we immerse ourselves in the colored baths of the paintings before us, we understand that dreams oscillate between the surface of consciousness and the abyssal depths of sleep. Beneath the surface layer, the stratification of brushstrokes applied back and forth shows that the surface reveals and restores the passages. The ink, elusive under the heavy brushstrokes, escapes, stretching its bite into the thickness of the fiber until the support becomes numb. Caught in a leaden cap - which Claire Chesnier calls the expanse of the veil - the colors slumber, strangely resembling the amplitude of the respiratory movements of deep sleep. The flow has an absorbing force that permeates everything, even the body that paints it.

Claire Chesnier coordinates her gesture—the withdrawal of her hand—with the slow unfolding of color, “for what does spreading color mean, if not charging the zenithal white with shadow?” She interrupts her interventions to observe the effects of languor and nascent clarity on the surface, the precipitation, in the chemical sense of the term, of day and night. Indeed, in the large monochrome areas, the light rises to the surface until it appears, as if in reverse. In this sought-after co-presence, inherent in the act of painting, the artist advances and suspends her action to wrest the body from gravity. Thus, she finds herself in a state of wakefulness, fearing sleep as much as inertia and death, “for the sleeper is a wavering presence-absence, a ghost of the self floating above a body abandoned by its strength, enamored or breathless with dreams,” she tells us.

Delicately fringed, almost slobbery white margins speak of our forgetful and relaxed bodies, but laziness, sighs, and the torpor that takes over combine with tensions that make rest impossible. In the large, gaping panels, we can see the uncertainty of falling asleep. Are we afraid of what sleep engulfs? The sensation of immersion is accompanied by a desire to escape. Advances and retreats, overlaps and gaps function as the reverse and the front of the same thing. We can see the materialization of the dream in the burial of the veils; its luminosity lurking in the darkness or at its edge reminds us that our consciousness has no hold over its manifestations.

This painting stands in the sharing of light and dark, it shows concern for blindness and visions, fearful of extinction. It seeks the power of revelations and fears their imminence. Painting then becomes a matter of laying down with precision, watching for connections, waiting for what will happen, with a keen awareness of the challenges of mastery and relinquishment of the life of day and night. The action of awakening and the non-action of sleep stand side by side, just like limbo and filtered shadows.