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 of substance. Despite its duty to illuminate, fire tends to focus attention, to steal the show, to show nothing but the eternal attempt of its chthonic dance. Its paradox, again: to be both that through which life boils and that through which catastrophe arises.

Claire Chesnier's painting has the character of fire. It has the same attributes, except that by using neither the technique nor the subject, it accomplishes its presence, its floating revelation, its anima, in other words, its breath. Herein lies the paradox of this painting, which has the same origin as burning and which, by illuminating, offers itself, in spite of itself, as a counter-place.

The supreme vocation of painting: to reveal. It is only by bringing one's gaze close to a painting that the abyss opens up. Paradox, once again, of a painting that shines from within. Above all, in the case of Claire Chesnier's work, which is a non-image, there is a search for what cannot be represented and has no visible horizontality, no response to the repeated probing of the eye; it is in this absence of signs that she stirs. A mirror of remembered slowness, this painting does not explore an outburst from the surface but from within: a Pandora's box, if you like, but it is hope that lifts it up.

To the passerby who has never seen a painting by Claire Chesnier and asks what it looks like, one should reply: "It's 10:30 p.m. in the summer! " Then one could tell them that Claire Chesnier's painting is smooth, smooth not in the conventional sense—so pejorative—in which one would mean that nothing extraordinary is happening, but smooth in the sense of a refusal of thickness, of tenderness given—and without compromise—to the beloved surface. Smooth, perhaps, but it is the smoothness of prayer, the repeated caress of time, the secular power of paper. By putting too much ink on the paper, sometimes the composition turns dark: its variation then becomes a gradual attenuation of vivid gradations into a black tone. What does the artist portray? Certainly not anything related to resemblance or color. It would be a mistake to see Claire Chesnier's work as a study of color. Her painting has the same grace as water seen in its flight, as a wave chasing a surface. Let's not try to distance ourselves from it; on the contrary, let's press our noses against the paper to understand that there is all the distance our bodies need, all the lush vegetation that pleases our stroll. There we find the places of ignorance in our sleep, the buried dimension of the hours that escape us, the gentle penetration of our shipwreck. This is therefore not the work of a colorist: any attempt at stylistic control in this sense would be short-lived. It would be like seeing only the existence of flesh in man. Claire Chesnier's commitment to painting lies elsewhere: it lies in light, in transparency, in the struggle of the gaze between the darkened form and the white space that carves it out.

This painting feeds on what cannot be named and dances with what can no longer be seen. Claire Chesnier's painting is permeated by the secret despejo of art. But what is despejo? If we stick to Baltasar Gracián and his theory of despejo, which is less a theory

than a simple variation in mood, less a precept than an open conversation, it is that sense of wonder that hangs in the air, close to the effect of poetry, which Gracián believes he sees in the gentleman, and which touches man before it touches art (or both at the same time): “It is the life of great qualities, the breath of words, the soul of actions, the luster of all beauty.” And then he insists, his translator never really knowing how to render these words from Spanish, except precisely—so as not to take any risks—by calling it the “je ne sais quoi”: "It is the soul of beauty [...]. It is much easier to feel it than to know it [...]. It would no longer be a ‘je ne sais quoi’ if we knew what it was. " An intrinsic part of the arcane, despejo is the release of discourse, its fabulous beyond, its moving and harmonious invisibility. It is the possibility (which stems not from will but from the generous and overwhelming coincidence of the stars) of creating turmoil in the painted object. Despejo only makes sense in its persistence, in its belated continuity in yielding to the promptness of presence. See a painting by Claire Chesnier at the end of a corridor, on the wall of this gallery, below this glass roof, or above your bedside lamp, and immediately all your hours are changed: the despejo acts not only when you are in front of the work, but it remains when you go down the stairs of the Belleville station, take the subway, or admire the calm bustle of the port at the Bassin de l'Arsenal. Once you love a painting by Claire Chesnier, it becomes a companion for life, a friend who smiles even in her absence. Claire Chesnier's painting is a refuge of persistence; the hours refuse to end, they linger through their loving flow, because it is a lesson in blood that this Nervalian artist with a Taoist gaze dictates to us.

Perfection is withdrawal, it is what is missing from the story. Beauty is always the incompleteness of what is passing away. To contemplate a painting by Claire Chesnier is to give oneself over, bound hand and foot, to the story of the gap, where man is contained in the intuition that precedes his gesture. What can the sky and the sea do in the face of the painter's despejo? Absolutely nothing. No doubt they freeze. This is the phenomenon known as painting, which only begins when the alliance with emptiness reigns with the belief that man's fate lies in the painting sealed before him. Art is faith in the work as a map. And so the despejo never ceases to call for fire with all its might. One wonders what happens at the heart of storms. Do we live in the company of a painting by Claire Chesnier as if in the presence of a storm? It is possible, because in these ink slips everything is turned upside down. An acute awareness of fragility: this is what these paintings of the threatening night bring.

Looking at the tops of these silhouettes, we sometimes glimpse the trace of adhesive tape on the edges of these vessels, in other words, an imprint, similar to those opera sets where a poorly isolated extra leaves the shadow of his passage behind. From a distance, one might think of a balustrade at the edge of the void, a thorn, a barrier marking the place not to be crossed, or the miraculous cavalcade of a second hand marking time from the top of its small, slender frame. This is where the life of matter is inscribed, its furious evasion tinged with caprice and procrastination.

These paintings are a relentless presence, a certain idea that the surface of the paper cheerfully maintains with its surroundings. Of course, it would be extravagant to speak of a silent explosion for this painting, which is nothing spectacular, which lays down the law with intimacy, in the concentration of the marriage of movement. At a time when nothing is slow anymore, neither the skies nor the sound of speech, Claire Chesnier dares to use paint for compositions brushed with ink. Her paintings are shores: they allow us to see the being on the other side of meaning.

The artist does not give titles to her works, except for Roman or Arabic numerals inscribed on the back of the work, hidden behind the scenes of a city being built through staining, a technique of coloring by impregnation adopted by Morris Louis and taken up here for another verbal horizon by this reader of Yves Bonnefoy. Because they include the paintings that the artist destroyed, these numbers have the value of threnodies. We never see these numbers, but they are there, behind, and what they designate perpetuates the funeral elegy of paintings that will never return but can still be heard.

Painting is the capture of the world in its animality. Claire Chesnier gathers the confidence of the material: her brushstrokes are ambiguous, because they are on the border between the wild and the civilized; we don't really know which side they fall on. No doubt it is her art not to be totally grasped by the eye, even when we get as close as possible to the canvas-shore. We've had enough of painters! No, really, let's leave painting without them, far away, in the throats of volcanoes, under thick layers of dead leaves or trembling willows, in the memory of the seasons. Such was its vocation: never to be shown and to slumber luminously among lost songs. In any case, only magicians can bring it out, or the flood, or the apocalypse; unless we conceive of painting as Claire Chesnier does and deliver only its mortal version here on earth. There is no art in making painting, in seeking it out, in tearing it from its night. For there to be art, it must come to us, but when it does, it will be all the more pure and loving, all the more mysterious for having lasted so long in its farandole of happy calls from nothingness.

The question, then, is not whether Claire Chesnier's painting speaks to us, but whether we are ready to be silent with it, to feel in these ink-black twilights the equivalent of our ten-thirty evenings in summer, in these golds the accumulated expanse of our hours, in this red a surge of pride, in this Prussian blue the unacknowledged arrival of sleep, where everything is already behind us, so that in the eye she can return to us majestic, ardent, and clear.

© Mathieu François du Bertrand

in, Le Magazine des Arts n°9, April/May/June 2014, Lafont presse, Paris, 2014.