March 13th - April 25th 2026

"The wind left in my hand"
Kobayashi Issa (trans. R. H. Blyth)

"At the threshold of Claire Chesnier’s work lies an injunction to silence that is itself silent, profoundly paradoxical: one that leaves us without words, and in the same movement, enjoins us to speech. In this sense, her work could be described, in essence, as a painting of the liminal. Before her canvases, which interlace chromatic power and subtlety, we are overcome by a form of suspended emotion, a contemplative stasis that almost inevitably opens onto what Romain Rolland called an “oceanic feeling”. Following Freud, one may readily strip this feeling of its mystical wings, transforming it here into an impulse towards writing. We find ourselves before a passage, a limit that liberates and calls to us precisely because it is never sharp or cutting, remaining blurred and porous, mingling earth with water, light with darkness, hesitating between the twilight of evening and that of morning. It thus possesses a remarkable power of attraction which, through the infinite variations of colour, saturation, and the seepage of ink layers into one another, draws us at once towards both reconciliation and release: an open surface, an invitation to see.(...)"
Yannick Mercoyrol

Ceysson & Bénétière
5 Chome-12-6 Ginza, Chuo City
104-0061 Tokyo - JAPAN
ceyssonbenetiere.com