In Paris, the Ahah presented a collection of graphic works by Claire Chesnier, most of which had never been exhibited before. Entitled “Par espacements et par apparitions” (Through Spaces and Appearances), a way of summarizing her relationship to artistic creation, the exhibition invited visitors to experience painting in order to reach the elusive, something akin to the shifting of the gaze, the relative revelation of mystery.

When she talks about her work, Claire Chesnier (born in 1986 in Clermont-Ferrand, lives and works in Paris) evokes “a light depth of color and time.” For her first exhibition at ahah, an association of which she has been a member since January 2020, she recently took over the Griset space in Paris with a body of graphic works, most of which were being shown for the first time. The title of the exhibition, “Par espacements et par apparitions” (Through Spacings and Appearances), is a way of summarizing her relationship to artistic creation, the way in which elements appear to her in art. She views color as an event and approaches painting as a material. “Painting is an enigma to me,” she says. Her relationship with it is part of a poetic relationship with the world. Smooth in style, her works present a mixture of colors that seem to form a gradient, a spectrum, and are always read from top to bottom, vertically. For Claire Chesnier, the mystery lies in creation. “It is water painting, ink painting,” whose rhythm and tactility she loves, and whose rather diaphanous vertical edges give way to sparkles as one approaches the center, the junction, to vibrations of light. It is precisely this threshold moment that interests her. Deliberately stepping back, she leaves room for the viewer's gestures and imagination, adding successive layers like a glaze. With each application, Claire Chesnier puts her work back into play, aware that this is a necessary risk in order to move forward in her work. The artist seeks encounter. Each creation is made up of intertwined, braided colors. One must listen to the painting to form a body with it, experience it, enter into the sensation to finally reach a color that cannot be named, something that has to do with the shifting of the gaze.

Painting as evidence

After graduating from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris in 2011, Claire Chesnier began working according to a method that had almost imposed itself on her a decade earlier, using formats that were always vertical, neither too small nor too large, on a human scale. “Precisely, I think I really started painting when I got rid of the question of ‘what (to paint)?’ because painting cannot be subject to anything other than itself. The painting I pursue is without pretext or anecdote. It is presence, subject[2],” she confides, before adding: “The way we paint inevitably says something about our relationship to the world.” Claire Chesnier's art is anything but minimalist. It attempts to achieve something necessary. The artist must remain acutely attentive and at the same time open-minded.

Two sets of works created in 2019-20 opened the exhibition. The large ink on paper works are complemented by smaller works executed in colored pencils, which are somewhat countered by the artist who, using a kind of resin, creates a sense of fog, an impressionistic landscape. The relationship to repetition here is not one of forgetting or erasure. The ink establishes a definitive gesture. The first layers, indelible, create an expanse comparable to a rolling wave, a surf.

The experience of material

Claire Chesnier's paintings have no titles. Instead, they bear a number corresponding to the date on which they were completed. The artist likes to link her work to a sense of time. By creating a surface that has an ambiguity, she reveals the cabalistic dimension of the image. Her productions are more like a bath of sensations, a relationship with a presence that cannot be defined, something linked to the magic of everyday life, a feeling of light depth, a “thickness of reflection,”

something elusive, comparable to Claude Monet's experience when, at the end of his life, blind, he painted not what he could no longer see but what he felt. “It is through the brush that he sees things,” explains the painter, before confiding, “I am very synesthetic.” Seventeen years of classical dance and a love of music, the experience of creation mobilizes all the arts in her. She confides that she never paints without music, with a preference for baroque music and an attachment to polyphony. This creates a kind of mixture of the senses and a vacant attention. Being there without being there. Claire Chesnier is sensitive to opposites that attract.

We sometimes tend to compare her works to photography. However, they have no connection to the medium other than sharing the idea of revelation in its physical sense of appearance. The artist herself speaks of “ravishment” or “rapture” in the sense that the painting is as if captured. The other comparison one might be tempted to make with photography is the use of paper mounted on Dibond for its relationship to photosensitivity, to the impression of light on paper, the etymological definition of photography. Added to this is an intensity that is both luminous and textural, rather than color. The question of the threshold, of what we cannot see or what is barely perceptible, is central to her work. Finally, her approach to the surface maintains a special relationship with touch.

Claire Chesnier's work feels like “(...) the memory of a romantic painting that has lost its subject while retaining its sensitivity[3],” as Corinne Rondeau so beautifully puts it. The artist works with gravity, standing upright, adding layers of transparency. Deposits of time, deposits of the gaze, and deposits of pigments then intersect. The color struggles to hold on to the paper, seeming almost suspended. “My paintings are an affirmation of the surface and a search for the ‘depth of light’[4]” confides the painter, who has learned to let herself be guided by the material. Frequent brush strokes diffuse the inks, which, like infiltrations, spread in delicate and countless variations on the paper support. The unstable pigments evolve until the ink is finally dry. That is when the image appears. Claire Chesnier's art has something to do with alchemy, the magic of the image. Her inks live in the memory of previous layers. They call for contemplation, suggesting the idea of a landscape, a horizon that never imposes itself, leaving it to the viewer's imagination to construct their own evocations. This art, in which colors seem to blend into one another, overflowing their frames—an overflow that must be accepted—to the point of rendering them indefinable, exudes a great sensuality. “(...) I have the impression that the sky is not only above us but rather that it touches us, that it reaches the ground, that we walk in it[5].” The artist dreams of the sky passing through her, more broadly, “of an image of fluidity between things, between people.” This is precisely what we feel when we stand before her work. “As he fell, he realized he was heavier than his dream, and from then on he loved the weight that had caused him to fall.” Claire Chesnier has a predilection for materials that elude her.

Guillaume Lasserre for Médiapart




[1] Quoted in Aude Lavigne, Les cahiers de la création, France Culture, February 26th 2020, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-carnets-de-la-creation/la-plasticienne-claire-chesnier Consulted on December 15th 2021.

[2] « Dans l’œil des collectionneurs : Claire Chesnier », interview by Julie Perrin, Alternatif-art, June 2015.

[3] Corinne Rondeau, « A corps perdu », Offshore art contemporain, September 2016.

[4] Claire Chesnier, « Constructing Liquid Veils: An Interview with Claire Chesnier by Matthew Hassell », New York Art Magazine, November 2013.

[5] Arnaud Laporte, A quoi rêvez-vous ? France Culture, October 10th 2021, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/a-quoi-revez-vous/claire-chesnier-il-y-a-toujours-de-la-couleur-dans-le-noir Consulted on December 17th 2021.

[6] Pierre Reverdy, « La Saveur du réel », « Poèmes en prose », in Œuvres complètes, tome 1, Flammarion 2010, p. 57.