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 involves coloring through impregnation. Claire Chesnier reminds us that painting was never meant to “be itself,” a simple fall, a display of pure material; what she illuminates is a crossroads of harmonies, calls to presence, where the sign is fluid and uncertain. Her strength lies in a floating revelation. We can therefore speak of a paradox, because we are witnessing the unfolding of a painting that, in seeking light, does nothing but darken (by using too much ink, the composition can turn dark). It is a gradual attenuation of vivid gradations into a black tone, sometimes apparent, that of an ink twilight reminiscent of a decline in brightness, and the rest of the time a quasi-monochrome motif. Her work therefore tends to identify the physical relationship that the body has with the “emptiness around it” (Pierre Frayssinet). It was through music and dance that Claire Chesnier came to painting.

The artist works tirelessly to create a long ink work on paper surfaces by applying selected shapes to a white background, protecting them before any intervention with waterproof tape, then soaking the paper, letting it drain, and finally brushing it. However, it would be wrong to see this as a work on color. If there is color, it is only a pretext, a way of approaching something else, another object of desire that is revelation, exposed burning, the fragility of the gesture. Claire Chesnier's painting is a non-image; there is no visible representation in this work, no primary horizontality, so her commitment lies elsewhere. Its unfolding is found in light, in transparency, in the marriage of the gaze between the darkened form and the white space that carves it out.

One can speak of vibrato for her ink compositions. Vibrato is the chasm within a given aesthetic approach, which is only a reflection of the life of the material, a shift that is nevertheless framed by the artist's gesture. It is the way art “preserves chaos” (Nietzsche) and shelters within itself a reserve of time, even constituting itself as a reserve. Vibrato is matter engraving an incident in its very being, a break in its spoken being, a foreign country in its place being. It is a drifting coloring effect, that “before,” that prow, that beating of the poetic that nestles in the body of the painting to make it shine from within.

We can speak of variations for these flows of ink: we can also speak of caprice, of “infinito” (Leopardi), of a transparent fall delivered to the narrative of the eye, because her works can never be repeated due to the eccentricity of the material to which they are subjected.

Claire Chesnier's brushstrokes are ambiguous, as they straddle the line between the wild and the civilized. The artist gathers the secrets of the material. Claire Chesnier is represented by the Galerie du Jour agnès b. in Paris.

She has shown her works in major exhibitions in France and abroad, notably at the House of Arts in Beijing and the T-Gallery in Bratislava, and her works will be presented in 2014 in the collection of the François Schneider Foundation in Wattwiller and in the new exhibition at the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine.

© Mathieu François du Bertrand

in, News Art Today – text from the program “Artist's Studio, Claire Chesnier,” Paris, November 2013.