Un rose, une rosée, un couchant

A ROSE, A DEWDROP, A SUNSET

December 5 2024 - January 25 2025

Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, Paris
www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

"What happens in this use of color, in this oscillation that goes from the density of the pigment to a luminous cloud of a halo, leads to a shift to a different way of seeing, to the acceptance of detachment, of the disappearance of forms, but also to the acceptance of undecidability, indeterminacy, unpredictability. My intuition tells me that the image is there, in the radiant thickness of this floating line, at this porous edge, at this changeable, versatile border between abstraction—I stand before movements, forces, impulses, currents, presences—and figuration—I stand before landscapes, clearings, skies, dawns, fires, perhaps twilights, I stand before the dew of a winter meadow, condensation in a whisky glass, an evening sea, a cloudy sky, a ghostly love. I stand before absence, before something that is happening and that I do not know. What happens to us when we disappear. Disappearance.

Claire Chesnier remains at a distance, observing the emptiness, her language plays in the silence, clear, waiting, while she is a replica of her color, which enters into the whiteness of the paper, carrying it without forcing it, becoming one with the paper in the streaks that remain, the smoothness of a current, the suggestion of evaporation."

Maylis de Kerangal (trans. Laurie Hurwitz)

From a text by Maylis de Kerangal in Claire Chesnier (Paris: JBE Books, December 2024), co-published by Gallery Ceysson & Bénétière, THE PILL®, Pascaline Mulliez Endowment Fund, L’ahah and CCC-OD, with the support of ADAGP.