Exhibited alongside painter Denis Laget at the ETC gallery, Claire Chesnier deeply unsettles viewers with her captivating ink paintings on paper.

What strikes us when we arrive at Claire Chesnier's studio (born in 1986) is the soft color of her eyes. A faded blue gaze that, when she sits down in front of the large glass window to answer our questions, becomes even brighter, seeming to echo the paintings that surround her. Calm, serious, and composed, Claire Chesnier is neither talkative nor expansive; she expresses herself clearly, sometimes pausing for silence, reflecting. Her studio reflects her personality—although, of course, she probably had to tidy it up to welcome us: flooded with diffused light (northwest), the room is nicely arranged, with the inks carefully lined up. On a sideboard, jars filled with dozens of colored pencils await selection; on the floor, very large Asian brushes, which she chooses for their softness, are gathered in bunches.

A “synesthetic” artist

Next to us, a piece of furniture holds a few plants and a turntable, accompanied by a beautiful collection of vinyl records. You wouldn't guess it from the intense calm that pervades her paintings, but Claire always works with music playing; she likes baroque, American minimalists, rock... In fact, she confides, looking back on her childhood, music was her first love, and it led her to dance for seventeen years. “Very synesthetic,” she says, she weaves many links between her way of looking at painting and music, talking about rhythm, range, and relationships of correspondence. “There is this bundle where things only happen when they meet.”

Born in Clermont-Ferrand, Claire spent her childhood in the Tours region and came to Paris as soon as she graduated from high school, with one idea in mind: to visit museums as much as possible. In addition to her visits, she landed odd jobs as a gallery attendant at the Louvre and Orsay. Studious and extremely hard-working, she simultaneously pursued a course at the Beaux-Arts, in Jean-Michel Alberola's studio, and another at the Sorbonne, in “art and art sciences,” which led her to a doctorate. Impressive! Her seriousness still accompanies her today: every morning, she gets up very early, starts with a writing session (she is currently reworking her thesis for publication) and then paints. She also reads a lot: Virginia Woolf, Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Antoine Emaz.

As for her use of ink, that goes back a little over ten years. The young woman works in glazes, that is, very thin layers of pigment inks, whose shades she creates herself by mixing them beforehand—and the inks will mix further on the paper. She superimposes the layers, like veils, and imprints a little of the “variations in the air” and the season in which she is painting (for example, she refers to “cool transparency” to describe this month of January). Claire also elaborates on her “silent gesture, absorbed by the paper.”

And the result? “The surface appears like a reflection,” which evokes “the blue of the sea, rich with everything we cannot see,” clouds, the seabed, the changing light of the sun or moon.

Well-kept manufacturing secrets

For her winter exhibition at the ETC gallery, which has represented her since 2020 (she was previously at the Galerie du Jour), director Thomas Benhamou suggested she choose an artist for a duo exhibition; she thought of Denis Laget, even though his practice is the opposite of hers. He is known for his “creamy gesture, his imprint,” while she completely effaces herself behind the painting, leaving only the mystery of “how is it done?”

But, she explains, she feels a very strong connection between their two ways of working with paint, of placing themselves on the “threshold,” and evokes the “risk of mud.” The expression is hers, but developed by critic Jean-Charles Vergne in the catalog:

"For the former, this risk is that of an overload of ink saturating the physical capacity of the paper without any possibility of recovery. For the latter, this risk is that of the tomb, of burial—in the literal sense of the term—in an oily material corrupted by a luxuriance bordering on debauchery. "

She sometimes fails, it's true, falling into this trap of overload—

but, she explains with a smile, she doesn't immediately throw away these failed works, which may subsequently guide her. Her secrets of production? She evades the question. It's impossible to describe the typical creation of a painting: “I prefer people not to feel that I am at work, which is why I am discreet about my technique.” The silence she talks about so much also goes hand in hand with a strong interest in blurring, which means that “the eye has to acclimatize to the colors” and allows nothing to be fixed, so as to remain more “alive.”

While everyone is free to interpret her large abstract works as landscapes or misty views,

Claire says that her attraction to abstraction stems from the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his erotic drawings. When she discovered them, she was struck by the “coincidence between the body of the task and the figurative body, as if the painting had a body.” Her practice of abstraction is intended to be infinitely tactile and sensual (the dancer is also speaking here): “I entered into the sensation.”

And her work ignores neither reality nor its upheavals,

since after a significant personal event, she stopped enclosing the layers of ink in a geometric shape and instead allowed them to spread across the entire surface: “It made me accept the overflow.” “ At the moment, she observes that a balance is being created between the ‘sky’ and ”earth" parts of her paintings, as if the sky were clearing. And the future? Why not try her hand at glass, large murals, or stage design for shows? We can guess that Claire Chesnier has not finished exploring the infinite sensations of color with her delicate and bewitching inks...

Maïlys Celeux-Lanval pour Beaux-Arts Magazine, "Grand format"