January 30 - March 22 2025

Gallery Ceysson & Bénétière - Lyon
www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

curator : Anne Favier

Pierre Buraglio
Claire Chesnier
Jeremy Liron
Tania Mouraud

Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière
21, rue Longue
69001 Lyon

In the blur, another vision of art, from 1945 to the present day

April 30 - August 18 2025

Musée de l'Orangerie - Paris

Curators
Claire Bernardi, director of the musée de l’Orangerie
Emilia Philippot, chief curator, assistant to the director of studies at the Institut national du patrimoine
In collaboration with Juliette Degennes, curator at the Musée de l'Orangerie

The Water Lilies have long been seen as the paragon of abstract, all-over, sensitive painting. On the other hand, the vagueness that reigns over the vast aquatic expanses of Monet's great canvases has remained an unthought. This exhibition explores this dimension of Monet's late work as a genuine aesthetic choice whose posterity must be brought to light. Deliberately making vagueness a key to modern and contemporary art, it brings together works by some fifty artists. Through them, the blur is revealed as the privileged means of expression of a world where instability reigns and visibility has become blurred. This aesthetic of f lou is rooted in the ruins of the Second World War, and unfolds its specifically political dimension. Acknowledging the profound upheaval in the world order, artists opted for the indeterminate, the indistinct and the allusive, placing greater emphasis on the viewer's interpretation. In this way, vagueness becomes both a symptom and a remedy for a world in search of meaning: at the same time as betraying instability, it creates the conditions for re-enchantment.

The exhibition will follow a thematic rather than chronological thread. An introductory room will be devoted to the aesthetic roots of vagueness in the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, following the intellectual, scientific, societal and artistic upheavals with which Impressionism grew up. The exhibition will then be divided into three main sections, combining pictorial works, videos, photographs and installations: “At the frontiers of the visible”, “The erosion of certainties”, and “In praise of the indistinct”. An epilogue, “re-enchanting the world”, will open the exhibition, focusing in particular on artist Mircea Cantor's trembling affirmation of “unpredictable future”.

www.musee-orangerie.fr

du 6 juin 2025 au 18 janvier 2026

vernissage le 5 juin à partir de 18h - galerie blanche

CCCOD (Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré) - TOURS

commissariat : Marine Rochard

En 2025, le CCCOD propose à Claire Chesnier d’habiter la galerie blanche avec ses peintures récentes qui sont autant d’espaces, de moments, de réminiscences, de récurrences. Chacune d’entre elles est un entrelacement de couleurs, de transparences et de clartés apposées couche après couche et à la surface desquelles affleure systématiquement, ces dernières années, une partition horizontale des masses. Celle-ci nous évoque irrésistiblement une ligne d’horizon marquant le point de jonction entre la terre et le ciel. Elle est plus subtile qu’une simple frontière, plus insondable qu’un sfumato du quattrocento induisant une perspective atmosphérique. Pour son exposition, l’artiste développe en collaboration avec la firme Olumee une nouvelle installation lumineuse qui permettra d’éprouver le temps de sa peinture et la manière dont elle change en fonction des heures du jour. Cette exposition personnelle au CCCOD s’inscrit dans un cycle d’expositions consacrées au travail de Claire Chesnier qui se succéderont en France et à l’étranger de 2024 à 2026 et seront accompagnées d’une monographie aux Editions JBE Books.

CCCOD - Tours
Jardin François 1er 37000 Tours
T +33 (0)2 47 66 50 00 F +33(0)2 47 61 60 24
contact@cccod.fr

À 5 min en tramway de la gare de Tours, arrêt Porte-de-Loire , Bus lignes 12, 53, 54, 4, 57
À 1h10 de Paris en TGV. Par l’autoroute A10, sortie Tours Centre
horaires d’ouverture : du mercredi au dimanche de 11h à 18h | le samedi jusqu’à 19h

"Sometimes painting appears in literature. You open a book and there it is. Transferred to a picture on the page. You do not know much about it, you are not aware of its size, its material, its light, you do not understand it, but the image presents itself and sometimes lingers on your retina for a long time."
Maylis de Kerangal (trad. Laurie Hurwitz)

With texts by
Jean-Michel Alberola
Maylis de Kerangal
Molly Warnock
Pierre Wat

Hardcover - 240 pages - Available in french and english
www.jbe-books.com

Coédition Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery and THE PILL®, with the participation of L’ahah, the Pascaline Mulliez Endowment Fund and the Centre de création contemporaine Olivier Debré – CCC OD, Tours (FR) on the occasion of Claire Chesnier’s solo exhibition (galerie blanche) from June 6, 2025 to January 18, 2026.
With the support ADAGP, Bourse collection Monographie 2024

THURSDAY JANUARY 22 AT 6PM

PALAIS DE TOKYO'S BOOKSHOP
13, avenue du Président Wilson - 75116 Paris
www.palaisdetokyo.com

Launch of Claire Chesnier's monograph - Ed. JBE BOOKS
RSVP info@jbe-books.fr

"Sometimes painting appears in literature. You open a book and there it is. Transferred to a picture on the page. You do not know much about it, you are not aware of its size, its material, its light, you do not understand it, but the image presents itself and sometimes lingers on your retina for a long time."
Maylis de Kerangal (trad. Laurie Hurwitz)

With texts by
Jean-Michel Alberola
Maylis de Kerangal
Molly Warnock
Pierre Wat

Hardcover - 240 pages - Available in french and english
www.jbe-books.com

Coedition Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery and THE PILL®, with the participation of L’ahah, the Pascaline Mulliez Endowment Fund and the Centre de création contemporaine Olivier Debré – CCC OD, Tours (FR) on the occasion of Claire Chesnier’s solo exhibition (galerie blanche) from June 6, 2025 to January 18, 2026.
With the support ADAGP, Bourse collection Monographie 2024

December 5 2024 - January 25 2025

Gallery Ceysson & Bénétière, 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, Gallery THE PILL, Pascaline Mulliez Endowment Fund, L’ahah and CCC-OD, with the support of ADAGP.

July 5 -7, 2024
Preview: July 4

c/o THE PILL® - Booth HO8
PACIFICO Yokohama, Japan

with Mireille Blanc - Dirk Braeckman - Claire Chesnier - Pablo Davila - Jean-Charles Eustache

more informations & preview

For its inaugural participation in the second edition of Tokyo Gendai, the gallery is pleased to present
From Me Flows What You Call Time, a group show that draws inspiration from Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu's awe-inspiring orchestral composition, and brings together recent works by Mireille Blanc, Dirk Braeckman, Claire Chesnier, Pablo Dávila and Jean-Charles Eustache. 
The title is borrowed from one of the exhibited works by Mexican artist Pablo Dávila who used Takemistu's score sheet of the same name in one of this text based works which refers to the Japanese composer's relationship to time and space translated into void and silence in his music. 
The booth is orchestrated like a partition in which thoughtfully selected works aim to provoke the questioning of our expectations in dealing with the passing of time, and the psychological lens with which we process events in our memory. 

www.thepill.co
www.tokyogendai.com

27 I 06 - 13 I 07 I 2024

Opening Thursday June 27th from 3pm

with : Pierre Buraglio, Max Charvolen, Claire Chesnier, Noël Dolla, Lesley Foxcroft, Tomona Matsukawa, Nicolas Momein, Florian Pugnaire & David Raffini, Aurélie Pétrel, Lionel Sabatté, Jean-Luc Verna

Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière
21, rue du Renard, 75004 - PARIS
galerie@ceysson.com
www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

More informations

26 I 06 - 27 I 07 I 2024

with : Özlem Altın, Claire Chesnier, Pablo Dàvila, Elif Erkan, Jean-Charles Eustache, Leylâ Gediz, Eva Nielsen, Elsa Sahal

THE PILL®
181 Mürselpaşa Caddesi – Balat - Istanbul 
contact@thepill.co
https://www.thepill.co

More informations

« The color, which resembled some of the bands of the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they named it a color after all. » H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space, 1927. 

In his famous short story, The Colour Out of Space, published in 1927, American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft describes the extraordinary phenomena that occurred on an isolated farm in 1882. A white cloud at high noon, a series of explosions in the air, precede the fall of a meteorite that reveals at its heart an unknown colour, impossible to define. Unnameable. The stone from the farthest reaches of outer space inexplicably contracts in its crater, transforms itself, attracts lightning. The flora becomes luxuriant before turning corrupt and crumbling into a grayish powder. Beasts and men suffer the influence of this inexpressible colour which, in a few months, inexorably transforms the landscape into a « lightning land » before suddenly propelling itself into the firmament to disappear forever, leaving behind a desolation similar to that of valleys whose tones have been undermined by the ashes of a volcanic explosion.

In the novella, color is, in the most literal sense, « the place where our brain and the universe meet », as Paul Cézanne said, underlining the deeply moving intimacy between colour and the eye. Beyond its fantastic register, The Colour Out of Space is the story of an encounter between a chromatic precipitate projected from the universe’s diffuse horizon and its fascinated, unthinkable - and ultimately cataclysmic - perception by those it touches, irreparably altering them. The title of the short story captures the ambivalence of this unholy hue exhaled from the heart of the meteorite: it falls from interstellar space, but at the same time, it is out of space. It creates space in an impalpable power, the extent of which the eye can measure, but which words cannot grasp, except in an approximate way. Colour is always stronger than language. Encountering a colour is an event in itself - we’ve all experienced it, fascinated by the dusky purple of a sky, the soft green of a meadow or the elusive iridescent modulation of a gaze. This event, staggering in its emergence, is nonetheless impossible to grasp. By establishing formal links and spatial connections between the works, this exhibition crosses the major themes of Lovecraft’s short story - unnameable colors, cosmic and earthly spaces, metamorphosis and regeneration.

Claire Chesnier’s auroral projections, Pablo Davilà’s particle circumvolutions and obsidian eclipse, Jean-Charles Eustache’s celestial colors and Eva Nielsen’s fiery skies form a constellation of atmospheres that responds to the organic, vital or material metamorphoses of Elsa Sahal, Özlem Altın, Leylâ Gediz and Elif Erkan in a movement of transformation and regeneration of forms.

Ed. ER Publishing
Edited by Pierre Wat

Contributors : Stéphane Bordarier - Damien Cabanes - Claire Chesnier - Vicky Colombet - Marc Desgrandchamps - Richard Long - Emmanuel Van der Meulen - Claude Viallat 

Translated by Laurie Hurwitz & Gauthier Lesturgie
Distributed by Les Presses du réel & Ideabooks

www.fr.erpublishing.net

26 I 06 - 27 I 07 I 2024

with : Özlem Altın, Claire Chesnier, Pablo Dàvila, Elif Erkan, Jean-Charles Eustache, Leylâ Gediz, Eva Nielsen, Elsa Sahal

THE PILL®
181 Mürselpaşa Caddesi – Balat - Istanbul 
contact@thepill.co
https://www.thepill.co

More informations

« The color, which resembled some of the bands of the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they named it a color after all. » H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space, 1927. 

In his famous short story, The Colour Out of Space, published in 1927, American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft describes the extraordinary phenomena that occurred on an isolated farm in 1882. A white cloud at high noon, a series of explosions in the air, precede the fall of a meteorite that reveals at its heart an unknown colour, impossible to define. Unnameable. The stone from the farthest reaches of outer space inexplicably contracts in its crater, transforms itself, attracts lightning. The flora becomes luxuriant before turning corrupt and crumbling into a grayish powder. Beasts and men suffer the influence of this inexpressible colour which, in a few months, inexorably transforms the landscape into a « lightning land » before suddenly propelling itself into the firmament to disappear forever, leaving behind a desolation similar to that of valleys whose tones have been undermined by the ashes of a volcanic explosion.

In the novella, color is, in the most literal sense, « the place where our brain and the universe meet », as Paul Cézanne said, underlining the deeply moving intimacy between colour and the eye. Beyond its fantastic register, The Colour Out of Space is the story of an encounter between a chromatic precipitate projected from the universe’s diffuse horizon and its fascinated, unthinkable - and ultimately cataclysmic - perception by those it touches, irreparably altering them. The title of the short story captures the ambivalence of this unholy hue exhaled from the heart of the meteorite: it falls from interstellar space, but at the same time, it is out of space. It creates space in an impalpable power, the extent of which the eye can measure, but which words cannot grasp, except in an approximate way. Colour is always stronger than language. Encountering a colour is an event in itself - we’ve all experienced it, fascinated by the dusky purple of a sky, the soft green of a meadow or the elusive iridescent modulation of a gaze. This event, staggering in its emergence, is nonetheless impossible to grasp. By establishing formal links and spatial connections between the works, this exhibition crosses the major themes of Lovecraft’s short story - unnameable colors, cosmic and earthly spaces, metamorphosis and regeneration.

Claire Chesnier’s auroral projections, Pablo Davilà’s particle circumvolutions and obsidian eclipse, Jean-Charles Eustache’s celestial colors and Eva Nielsen’s fiery skies form a constellation of atmospheres that responds to the organic, vital or material metamorphoses of Elsa Sahal, Özlem Altın, Leylâ Gediz and Elif Erkan in a movement of transformation and regeneration of forms.

October 26th - December 2nd 2023

Opening Thursday October 26th, from 6pm

Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery

21, rue Longue

69001 Lyon - France

www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

Press release

10-12 Nov. 2023

Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière

Main section - Stand B03

Maurice Estève, Bernar Venet, Frank Stella, Yves Zurstrassen, Claude Viallat, David Tremlett, Nam Tchun-Mo, Lionel Sabatté, Roland Quetsch, François Morellet, Nicolas Momein, Jean Messagier, Daniel Firman, Claire Chesnier, Alan Charlton, Franck Chalendard, Robert Brandy.

Preview

www.ceyssonbenetiere.com

www.luxembourgartweek.lu

June 24th - November 5th 2023
Opening Thursday June 22nd at 7pm

with Samira Ahmadi Ghotbi – Gilles Aillaud – Dirk Braeckman – Claire Chesnier – Gregory Crewdson – Ilse D’Hollander – Rineke Dijkstra – Vincent Dulom – Philippe Durand – Andreas Eriksson – Jean-Charles Eustache – Julian Farade – Roland Flexner – Clédia Fourniau – Marina Gadonneix – Gilgian Gelzer – Agnès Geoffray – Ron Gorchov – Nancy Graves – Nathanaëlle Herbelin – Lukas Hoffmann – Otis Jones – Rinko Kawauchi – Denis Laget – Maude Maris – Clémence Mauger – Tania Mouraud – Albert Oehlen – Marielle Paul – Aurélie Pétrel – Joseph Raffael – Marina Rheingantz – Sylvain Roche – Christine Safa – Camille Saint-Jacques – Milène Sanchez – Frank Stella – Jeanne Vicerial – Acharya Vyakul

curator and catalogue : Jean-Charles Vergne
catalogue available here : https://www.frac-auvergne.fr/produit/beautes/

FRAC Auvergne
6, rue du Terrail 63000 Clermont-Ferrand - France
www.frac-auvergne.fr

Commissariat: Sylvie Carlier, Jean-Charles Vergne, Laure Forlay
du 17 mars au 17 septembre 2023

avec : Dove Allouche, Darren Almond, Christiane Baumgartner, Carole Benzaken, Ghyslain Bertholon, Marian Breedveld, Franck Chalendard, Claire Chesnier, André Cottavoz, Marc Desgrandchamps, Jean‑Charles Eustache, Anne‑Marie Filaire, Daniel Firman, Delphine Gigoux‑Martin, Michel Gouéry, Rémy Hysbergue, Rémy Jacquier, Ernst Kapatz, Denis Laget, Jeremy Liron, Éric Manigaud, Maude Maris, Jean‑Luc Mylayne, Bernard Piffaretti, Martial Raysse, James Rielly, Sylvain Roche, Éric Roux‑Fontaine, Claire Tabouret, Djamel Tatah, Jacques Truphémus, David Wolle, et une photographie de la NASA.

Musée Paul Dini
Place Marcel Michaud
69400 Villefranche-sur-Saône 

https://www.musee-paul-dini.com/expositions/le-toucher-du-monde/
https://www.frac-auvergne.fr/exposition/le-toucher-du-monde-dialogue-entre-les-collections-du-frac-auvergne-et-du-musee-paul-dini/

Collection de l'Artothèque - Musées d'Angers

du 26 mai au 17 septembre 2023
Vernissage le 25 mai à 18h30 au Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers

commissariat : Elodie Derval

avec : Mali Arun, Elise Beaucousin, Cécile Benoiton, Gisèle Bonin, Claire Chesnier, Guillaume Colussi, Dominique de Beir, Makiko Furuichi, Zhu Hong, Irma Kalt, Clément Laigle, Yann Lestrat

https://musees.angers.fr/expositions/evenement/73122-perceptions/index.html

Pierre Cendors & Claire Chesnier, Ed. L’atelier contemporain, Strasbourg

https://editionslateliercontemporain.net/a-paraitre/litteratures/article/l-horizon-d-un-instant

Beauté(s)

Contributions de : Estèla Alliaud, Claire Chesnier, Sophie Desrosiers, Philippe Descola, Vincent Dulom, Fabrice Lauterjung, Yves Le Fur, Yves Michaud, Camille Saint-Jacques, Michel Thévoz, Jean-Charles Vergne.

Editions L'Atelier Contemporain / co-Editions FRAC Auvergne
sous la direction de François-Marie Deyrolle, Camille Saint-Jacques et Eric Suchère

Date de publication : 18 août 2023
http://www.editionslateliercontemporain.net/a-paraitre/beautes/article/la-beaute

(...) Poursuivant son effort d’interrogation du paradigme esthétique dominant et de déhiérarchisation de la culture, Beautés, cette fois, creuse et complique la question, à laquelle la destinait son nom, de la « beauté ». Cela revient à faire le pari qu’il peut jaillir une pensée prolixe et plurielle d’une aporie énigmatique : la beauté étant ce qui échappe toujours quand on tente de la définir, ou, pour le dire avec Maurice Blanchot, « ce qui se dérobe sans que rien ne soit caché ».
Cela, cependant, ne signifie pas qu’on ne puisse rien en dire. Au contraire, la beauté est peut-être ce qui par excellence met en mouvement la pensée. Prenant acte de la fin d’une prétention européenne à l’universalisme, comme de la fin de la prétention à « l’exception humaine » selon la formule de Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Beautés croise des approches philosophiques, anthropologiques ou sociologiques (celles de Yves Le Fur, Michel Thévoz, Yves Michaud, Philippe Descola) et des réflexions esthétiques, éthiques, politiques de plusieurs artistes contemporains (dont Claire Chesnier, Estèla Alliaud, Fabrice Lauterjung).
Ainsi Yves Le Fur cherche-t-il à « débusquer de la beauté dans de nombreux domaines qui ne relèvent pas des catégories habituelles », comme celui des pierres recelant des paysages cosmiques, ou celui de la sculpture africaine, dont la perception est souvent biaisée par un ethnocentrisme. Mais on peut songer aussi aux hypothèses théoriques et pratiques formulées par Claire Chesnier, qui interroge la possibilité de « coudre ensemble une averse », pour suggérer que « définir le terme de beautés reviendrait à encapsuler une multitude intenable » (...)