Starting in June 2025, the CCC OD invites Claire Chesnier to take up residence in the White Gallery with her recent paintings, which are as much spaces, moments, reminiscences, and recurrences. Each painting is an interweaving of colors, transparencies, and luminosities applied layer upon layer, on the surface of which a horizontal division of masses emerges. This division irresistibly evokes a horizon line marking the junction between earth and sky—more subtle than a simple boundary, as delicate as a Quattrocento sfumato.

For one of the spaces in the white gallery, the artist is also developing, in collaboration with the start-up Olumee, a new light installation that will allow visitors to experience the passage of time in her painting, but also to discover how much its appearance can change depending on the time of day.

The experience of Claire Chesnier’s work depends as much on the object being viewed as on our own gaze itself1, on the context of observation, and on the sensory and memory-based recollections that brush against us and momentarily intertwine with those that accompanied the artist during the creation of the work. The words chosen to describe her paintings2 can only be metaphorical or analogical, for “no matter how much we describe what we see, what we see never fully resides in what we say”3; these works fully engage perception, each of our senses.

They are, moreover, conceived on a human scale—in keeping, at least, with the artist’s own body. For the viewer as well, the relationship to the work is immediately physical: not only is it a tangible presence in the space, but it transforms within it thanks to the strange phenomenon unfolding on its surface. The inks blend imperceptibly before our eyes, creating the illusion that they are flowing, or rather that they are infusing one another to take on new shades that we had not previously perceived. These paintings, clearly, do not appeal to representation; they embody abstraction, if we may borrow these words from the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker4; they give form to the virtual existences5 of our impressions.

Nevertheless, our gaze is captured, and our imagination, against our will, wanders at the whim of the colors to see or to sense in these glows, in these fluorescences welling up from the surface, a ray of sunlight highlighting the morning dew on the grass, a blanket of mist rolling down the slope of a hill. This allusion to the landscape, to the sensory world, is contradicted by the use of systematically vertical formats that draw more on the pictorial tradition of portraiture. And indeed, one sometimes encounters a sense of flatness rather than penetrating the expanses and depths of a landscape. The horizon lines, uncertain edges, sometimes merely suggested, are woven vertically through the juxtaposition, intersection, and interpenetration of very fine ink lines.

Our gaze is immediately seized by a sense of discrepancy, by the realization of a physical impossibility, of the unthinkable, for this horizon line dissolves infinitely, flowing upward to defy gravity, as if the earth—those dark masses positioned in the lower sections—were melting to be then sucked up, breathed in by the sky.

Though evanescent in appearance, the paintings are nonetheless repeated allusions to the material world, to concrete reality, its textures, its brilliance, its roughness. These are raw, physical materials, sometimes also something contained, opaque, as if the image were infused, incorporated, or rather embodied. Claire Chesnier offers us “the physical possibility of feeling color”6 by presenting it as expanse, as space, and as duration.

The tension between horizontality and verticality, between flatness and expanse, creates a dizzying sensation that is difficult to describe intelligibly, one that also evokes a sense of incomprehension. Dazed to the point of becoming blind and deaf, we ultimately experience nothing but the eddies and undertow of the colored swaths seeping into our closed eyelids, flooded with sunlight.

Marine Rochard
Exhibition text "A vertical spreading", CCC OD, Tours, 2025–2026

Notes

1 I am paraphrasing André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres, Paris, Gallimard, 1971 [1897], p.21.
2 These are not really paintings: the artist uses inks and pigments that she mixes with a lot of water before applying them to a sheet of damp paper.
3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, p. 25.
4 Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Incarner une abstraction, Arles, Actes Sud, 2020 [lecture at the Collège de France in 2019].
5 On the subject of “virtual existences,” see Étienne Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence (Paris, PUF, 2009 [1943], as well as the interpretation provided by David Lapoujade, The Lesser Existences (Paris, Minuit, 2017).
6 Statement by Olivier Debré dated May 1977 and reproduced in Aspects de la peinture en France de 1950 à 1980 (exhibition catalog), Montauban, Musée Ingres, 1985, p. 23.