How could words express what I feel when looking at a work by Claire Chesnier, when even my mind does not really understand what happens when I contemplate one of her works? One could, of course, use images to evoke immersion in a landscape, a landscape in the literal sense, but even more so a mental landscape. One could talk about the transition from light to darkness, or perhaps the reverse, suggested by the verticality of her canvases. One could talk about the blurred, indecisive boundary that seems to cut the canvas in two, but without any ostentatious gesture. One could evoke the subtle, almost imperceptible changes in colour, even though the canvas offers two seemingly very distinct spaces.

Technically, Claire Chesnier's works have been following the same creative protocol for around ten years now: the artist soaks large-format watercolour paper with water, then applies ink, proceeding to ‘re-veil’ it by guiding the variations in the ink using brushes. Diluted, the colour becomes denser veil after veil. The ink acts like a glaze, and each layer of transparency that is applied reinterprets the painting in its entirety. The artist takes a back seat, giving way to the gesture of colour.

This approach allows for an experience that I have repeated so often: looking at Claire Chesnier's works from a distance, as far away as possible in the exhibition space, and then moving closer and closer until our eyelashes almost touch the surface. And the reverse experience, equally unsettling, of moving backwards, which reveals an ever-changing world.

Until 2 October, the MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing is exhibiting four paintings by Claire Chesnier recently acquired by the FRAC Auvergne, offering us a particularly interesting insight into the artist's work. These works form two diptychs, but each can also be presented individually. However, let's play along with the diptych and take a closer look at ‘130221 | 140221’ - Ink on paper, 160 × 134 cm and 163 × 135 cm. The formats here are on a human scale, allowing us to physically engage with the space of the work. The painting on the left goes from black to white from bottom to top, passing through shades of red, green and blue. The painting on the right goes from a reddish-brown to a very light blue from bottom to top, passing through shades of green, but also red. Shades. This word has never seemed so accurate and yet so imprecise to me. Appropriate in its imprecision. These two paintings, created one day apart, as their titles indicate, invite us to consider them as evening and morning. Twilight and dawn, sharing the same line between earth and sky, which could be that of the treetops of a forest, as seen with eyes almost closed. Our mind initially wants not only to see, but also to identify and understand the images presented to us here, transposing abstraction into landscape. This is a natural reflex, but one that is thwarted when we continue to look at the images over time. In a flamboyant declaration of independence, colour proclaims its right to exist for its own sake, inviting us to consider it as a living, mutating, active organism.

But let us return to this notion of a diptych. Two images, hung side by side, but with a space between them. Our minds, always on the lookout, think despite ourselves of the third image, the missing image, the one that exists in the space left between the two we see before us. It is the question of film editing that then enters the exhibition space. We want, again despite ourselves, to fill this void between evening and morning. In place of the white of the picture rail, where is the night that separates Claire Chesnier's two paintings? But once again, in this same train of thought that keeps recurring when viewing this artist's works, it is presence that takes over, the paintings before us concealing no mystery other than themselves. There is no missing image. There is a pure presence, that of painting, that of art as a way of being in the world, as a superior force for the expression of sensitivity and thought.

What seems most accurate to me, then, is to say that one does not look at a work by Claire Chesnier. She seems to invite us to enter into it, to inhabit it, to linger there, as if the space of the canvas became the space of our thoughts. Confusing, unsettling, indeterminate, shifting, sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Perhaps Claire Chesnier has succeeded in creating a visual transcription of the famous ‘stream of consciousness’ used in literature. In the visual artist's work, as in Virginia Woolf's The Waves, sensations lead to thoughts, which themselves transform into emotions, which turn into reflections, in a perpetual movement with no answer to give other than this movement, in itself, for itself.

If we recall that this use of stream of consciousness can also be found in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, perhaps we should consider that Claire Chesnier is offering us, with her patiently developed technique, self-portraits of the artist as a young woman.

Arnaud Laporte
April 4th 2022