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 different pieces. The flattening of certain works on these pedestals gives the inks a physical presence. As in the 2016 exhibition Résonances at the galerie du jour agnès b., the viewer is free to move around the paintings, searching (in vain) for a point of reference in the shimmering infinity of overlapping glazes. The paintings bear the title and traces of the seasons, days, and air that inspired them. They retain on their surface the edges of light that gave birth to the chromatic vibrations. The frame is overflowing, the paint is flowing. The blues of morning, the greens of water, and the glowing browns extend to the edge of the support. Each deposit of material on the paper is an exploration of the unknown, allowing the singularity of color to emerge by inscribing it into a larger whole with dizzying contours.

Vertigo is at the heart of Claire Chesnier's pictorial practice. It is an excess of sensations or emotions that leads to overflow, a gesture whose restraint is a slope, a presence whose grasp is absence. As the artist writes, "the hand feels the vertigo linked to the fall, to the material precipitated in its gravity—glowing on the ground. Light also arises from this speed, from the proximity of a fall that the hand would like to stretch out in order to prolong the slide in its continuous ebb.“ Vertigo is also poetry itself, or as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says in Poetry as Experience, if vertigo is ”the presence of the present,“ the poem is ”pure meaning." In the artist's eyes, poetic writing resonates intimately with the pictorial gesture, because words respond to the impossibility or difficulty of saying what happens in painting.

Looking at Claire Chesnier's paintings can lead to the dazzling effect Bataille speaks of, to the point of seeing nothing and knowing nothing. The colors and luminous reflections lodged beneath the thickness of the surface both retain and diffuse a sparkle that could blind us as we imagine and suspect the underlying darkness. The absence of form or preliminary drawing in the paintings produced for the Vertiges exhibition, unlike older works (exhibited notably in L'Aire des aurores at the Patio Art Opéra in 2014 or in Fragments d'une déposition at the galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris in 2012) opens up representation to the unlimited and follows the meanderings of the gaze. Claire Chesnier's inks give free rein to visual thinking. Abstraction is clearly at work, “painting comes in where words fail.”

© Iris Bernadac

in, Art Press 2 No. 458, September 2018