In Tours, Claire Chesnier's sky essence
Libération N° 13695July 26thWith 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 it, dazzled. Presented in Tours, her abstract paintings regularly punctuate the walls of the “galerie blanche”—an exhibition space at the Olivier Debré Contemporary Art Center bathed in zenithal light—like a score that is both restrained and loose.
No labels disturb the purity of the display. Carefully aligned and spaced apart, these vertical landscapes all depict pieces of horizons, with blurred lines and layers of color, unstable gradients, dark at the bottom, yellow, pink, mauve, blue, or pale green at the top. Dawn or dusk? It's a mystery, it's indeterminate.
Flesh. On the left, a typology of foamy clouds. On the right, clear, deep skies defy gravity: small black streaks rise upward as if the sky were sucking up the earth. Isn't that the green ray forming in the center of the works? They look like photographs taken from an airplane window. In fact, they are inks on paper, whose watery nature is evident, like giant watercolors. If these abstract inks resemble photographs so closely, it is undoubtedly because they are mounted on Dibond, with the aluminum stiffening the design. Each ink is named after the day it was made: 130424 (2024), for example. In “Une éclaircie à la verticale” (A Vertical Spreading), Claire Chesnier plays with our perceptions. Born in 1986 and a graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist, who is also trained in dance, is interested in the feeling of painting. And her project to make us experience it in our flesh is a success. With our retinas caressed by cottony swirls, we feel as if we are walking on a cloud, breathing in tiny droplets of water, our skin touched by cotton wool. “Painting is a story of touch, of how to touch and be touched,” the artist has also written.
Gaseuses. In a separate space, Claire Chesnier has developed a light installation (in collaboration with the start-up Olumee), where visitors can sit in front of a painting that changes according to the different hours of the day, in fast motion. "I hope that this installation opens up the possibility of this sensitive approach to a sky that is no longer simply above us, but in our eyes and in front of us, lying in passing ink veils." Inside the museum, the ceiling suddenly opens up, as does our skull: golden, green, and blue colors, gaseous and moist, move hypnotically. The painting is, at last, within us.