With their fragments of horizons made up of gradients and blurred lines, the artist's ethereal paintings are as soothing as they are physically challenging. Claire Chesnier wrote a beautiful sentence: “The sky touches us, we walk in it.” And her aerial work reflects this sentence: celestial, we walk within …

Light and profound, Claire Chesnier's painting reflects Corneille's famous oxymoron: “That obscure clarity that falls from the stars.” In painting, as elsewhere, we must be wary of simplistic categories, those that classify a work in a single word: abstract or figurative. Nothing is that simple. Such is the …

No matter how much I move to the side, away from these images and back again, I cannot decide whether they are monochromatic variations of a single pigment or polychromatic hues that dilute, generate and scatter several others, and this undecidable problem offers a kind of revelation: there is no more hue, …

When I ask her how she paints, Claire Chesnier says that she does not want to answer the question, and prefers to remain silent on the subject. This attitude, apart from her refusal to reduce her art to technical procedures to which too precise an answer would attract undue attention, also says something …

Each new work in the distinctive painterly medium Claire Chesnier has developed begins with the preparation of the paper support. A roughly life-size expanse is cut from a longer roll, affixed to hardboard, and moistened, a step that requires the utmost care: Opening the paper fibers, it makes the surface …

Claire Chesnier's paintings appear veiled. The layers of color they present to the viewer - as much as they propose them - seem less superficial than inhabited by a depth in which something seems contained. Like a fog that impedes the perception of a landscape, their densities seem to harbor images and …

These inks reveal unexpected tones to the patient eye. They are dawns, openings of light whose spectrum bends and unfolds like eyes squinting in the glare of a cloudless sky or the barely imaginable blaze of a misty trail on fire. They are the murky reflections of inert waters swaying towards the azure, the …

Claire Chesnier's works are very strange. You approach them, sure you'll recognize paint. These are colored inks. There's no thickness, no discernible variations in surface treatment. The tones are warm and cold, luminous and dark, but the word "gradient" cannot be applied. They are like close-ups of …

12 minutes of light per 12 hours of day, from dawn to dusk At dawn, before it happens, before the birds are audible and volatile. A burst of brilliance slowly rises from a source of grey — night clouds that are still visible. Soft wisps arch across the sky, gilded with the green, white gold alloy of fired …

When faced with the works of Claude de Soria and Claire Chesnier, the mind stops its circus of explanations, and magnetic fields hold the body at bay. Separated by two generations and different practices, sculpture and painting, they share something rudimentary, the scarcity of materials; something …

In reality, in front of this painting where color emancipates itself from the subject matter, one mainly thinks of Rothko. Chesnier openly admits her admiration for this pioneer of abstract expressionism. Rothko, whose colors, usually applied in transparent glazes, give rise to rectangular configurations …

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 …

"Life is a harmonic phenomenon, a constant disruption of balance, which generates a constant appetite for balance. It is the means of expression of matter. (...) An infinite number of notes exist on either side of the scale. An infinite number of colors exist on either side of the prism. An infinite amount …

How could words express what I feel when looking at a work by Claire Chesnier, when even my mind does not really understand what happens when I contemplate one of her works? One could, of course, use images to evoke immersion in a landscape, a landscape in the literal sense, but even more so a mental …

The surface is smooth, without irregularities, carefully circumscribed by a hexagon cutting like a blade whose upper edge – blunt, indecisive and blurred – forms a border through which the gaze enters and exits the body of the painting at will. It is a painting of acceleration and slow outpouring, a …

Painting, if it is to resurface unexpectedly, should be unassuming, allusive, memory-resistant, resonant, suffused with afterglow: outpourings and downfalls, at turns surging and burrowing, a weft of lights shining onto the paint and out from its organic core, and there is always the risk of achieving …

“We are falling. I am writing to you as we fall. This is how I experience the state of being in the world.”. René Char We always catch history in the middle. The world pre-exists your awakening, continues, extends beyond what a lifetime can achieve. We are only passengers. It already surpasses us, extending …

Claire Colin-Collin “Abstraction” is a word that I find difficult to use: it catalogues us, confines us to being sweet dreamers. It encloses us in a story, an aesthetic, whereas its definition has been so knocked about, disputed: I’m thinking of Philip Guston, Gérard Gasiorowski, Charles Maussion, back and …

Abetted by their regular brushwork, Claire Chesnier’s inks mutate in subtly diffuse variations through the fibres of the rag paper she works on. In their seeming spareness they proceed by deposition, calling on the artist to surrender to her matter – living substance, surely – and to come to terms with that …

For the exhibition Vertiges, Claire Chesnier presents a series of large-format paintings made with intertwined colored inks. Two of them are placed on pedestals carved to their dimensions, while the others face them on the wall, allowing viewers to move back and forth, weaving connections between the …

For some time now, Claire Chesnier has been moving towards a style of painting whose only limit is the edge: all-over sequences that reinforce its visual power, super kidnapping the eye towards a full immersion in color. From there, one might think that the artist is searching, through waves, for what is …

Veils of liquid-like colors stand out on large sheets of watercolor paper. A very precise creative process allows Claire Chesnier to bring out, with each new painting, the subtle interaction between form, color, light, and matter. Working on watercolor paper fixed to the wall and soaked with water, she …

Born in 1986, Claire Chesnier works exclusively on paper, always in vertical formats no larger than two meters by one and a half meters, with shapes inscribed on the white background of the sheet in trapezoids or other polygons (pentagons or hexagons) tapering downward or upward—but never toward the right or …

There is something mysterious at work in Claire Chesnier's art, which insists on presenting subtle monochrome expanses that play with effects of texture, light, and value, hovering between epiphany and disappearance. Color is contained within large polyhedral shapes that stand out against the immaculate …

Claire Chesnier, born in Clermont Ferrand in 1986, is an artist, an alchemist of color through ink and paper. The device of content containing her works is not a pretext for painting, or even drawing, but rather a physical presence of reality through work in which form and content are one. I met Claire …

The dawn draws a misty smoke above the rivers and lakes. It is a veil that comes between the rising sun and its reflection spreading through the surrounding air. It is its own heat that makes it impossible to see at the moment of its birth. We never know what begins at its beginning. Every cause within us is …

Claire Chesnier, the beautiful, hypersensitive... Without knowing her yet, I was on the jury of friends of the Beaux-Arts. Having been somewhat “raised” by my dear Jean Fournier, with whom I had interned for eighteen months, I immediately thought of him and how much he would have enjoyed Claire's work. He, …

Fire, its paradox: it is at once living memory, renewed body, but also the tool through which sight comes into being, the intermediary, the condition of objects to the point of being their receptacle, their cenotaph, and even their sole truth, for without it we would see little and our vision would be devoid …

Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Claire Chesnier has developed a highly distinctive style of painting, one of the most striking aspects of which seems to be its return to painting's original purpose: to reveal. Claire Chesnier's painting is reminiscent of Morris Louis's staining technique, which …

She is a painter and her painting appears, as she said, “within a double fragility : that of the porous surface of the paper and the fluctuation of the inks on one hand, and that of the retreat of the brushstroke and the coming forth of the « movement of the colour” (Marc Devade) on the other hand.” Young …

Matthew Hassell :  Where do you find inspiration for your compositions? Are they organically evolving through your process, or are they sourced from the outside world somewhere? Claire Chesnier : My compositions proceed from the avoidance of the edges of the paper facing me. The shapes I create result from a …

1 | Build a container. 2 |  Pour some liquid in it (water is preferrable). 3 | Construct a pipette. 4 | Take a bit of ink with the help of the pipette. 5 | Drip a drop of the chosen ink into the container. 6 | Take the container, put it in direct sunlight. 7 | Watch. It is not the work of an alchemist but …

For the past four years, Claire Chesnier has followed the same creative process: she soaks thick watercolor paper with water and fixes it vertically, defines her working area with adhesive tape, then releases large flows of dark colors using a brush dipped in ink. Using a large Korean brush, she then sweeps …

Some graphic practices are reversible, allowing for corrections and erasures. Others, however, are irreversible, as the artist's intervention is indelible. Claire Chesnier's work falls into the latter category: that of doing without undoing. The chosen format determines the extent of a gesture subject to an …

“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 …

For five years, Claire Chesnier has been following a constraint she set for herself: she limits herself to creating a colorful shape with sharp contours in the white space of the sheet of paper. Through this gesture—which is above all a “re-veiling,” a covering of the surface with a colored veil—she enters …

On the wall of the exhibition hall, stretched at the four corners by a nail, the sheets arch their edges. They do not offer the calm surface of a flat plane. Their edges nervously mark the arcs as stigmata of their origin and transport. They have been rolled. This is their first distinctive feature. Claire …