Claire Chesnier, born in Clermont Ferrand in 1986, is an artist, an alchemist of color through ink and paper.

The device of content containing her works is not a pretext for painting, or even drawing, but rather a physical presence of reality through work in which form and content are one.

I met Claire Chesnier in 2012 at Jeune Création at 104 in Paris, and she reconciled me with painting. I can't say exactly why, but something happened that went beyond the usual representation.

A vibrant frontier, a delicate edge, object/subject, Claire Chesnier's work is observed in the light, its colorful vibrato, its surface support with contemplation and slowness (the time it takes to be revealed) like an enigmatic landscape.

Defining it as a landscape is already, in a way, confining Claire's work. Perhaps it is just a question of intuition, of instinct, which she highlights.

Neither smooth nor materialistic, her work has something hypnotic about it for me, as if a veil had been delicately placed over the surface of the world.

Julie Perin: Claire Chesnier, you paint but you talk about drawing. What is the difference for you in your work?

Claire Chesnier: The work I do with inks is eminently pictorial. It calls upon the expanse, the field of color deployed in the open, the body of the support, the liquid material and its emergence on the blank page. Drawing is not what defines the work but what works on it, from within and at its threshold. Indeed, color comes to the surface by creating drawing. Its light rises at the same time as it inscribes its passage in a kind of vertical clearing, a horizon that opens up between the veils of color. The drawing also manifests itself through the edges. It is what contains the openness of color, its overflow. It presents itself as the frame of intervention, the window. While traditionally the frame completes or even perfects the painting, here it is the inaugural gesture of the openness of the surface. For what these provisional lines outline is like a doorway, the step to be taken to enter into color.

Julie Perin:The notion of time seems essential to your approach. What do you think?

Claire Chesnier: Painting is necessarily a relationship with and a singular experience of time. The ground of the painting, its material, its thickness, are deposited like the gesture, slowly, with attention and repetition. The slow unfolding of the inks and the intertwining of the veils of color absorb the time of doing, the time of the hand, for that of a rise, I would even say an invention, in the archaeological sense of the raising and uncovering of a previously buried body. There is a coincidence between the appearance and disappearance of light. The gaze seeks to perceive the light source at the same time as it remains ever-moving and elusive. White, for its part, begins to take over the space of overflow from color: it hollows out the time of the off-screen, the time of excess. It is an ellipsis of the flow, of the debacle of inks, of the outside of the gesture that passes and repasses the threshold of form. It is a silence on chaos and variegation, on colorfulness and multicoloredness. The time specific to this painting would then be that of the exhaustion of color and its brilliance, the time of stammering and dazzling, that which makes light tremble and stream clear.

Julie Perin: No pretext for drawing, for painting, neither figurative nor abstract, so what then?

Claire Chesnier: 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. However, otherness is not excluded. On the contrary. It comes in the encounter with the medium in front of me, the material I spread and the unknown that my brush crosses with each stroke. Defining the horizon of this painting that is always to come means composing the limits of its body, the edges of its liquidity, in relation to my own scale. But the horizon, Michel Collot points out, is "a non-place, impossible to locate on a map, essentially inaccessible: and yet without it, there is no landscape. " For my part, the horizon remains unstable, a line stretched and directed with force towards what is not yet, what will become of the gravity and diaphanousness at work within these liquid constructions.

Julie Perin: An artist?

Claire Chesnier: Fra Angelico

Julie Perin: A book?

Claire Chesnier: Et, néanmoins by Philippe Jaccottet

Julie Perin: You in one word?

Claire Chesnier: Me: I don't know. Maybe it's not for me to say.

What I aspire to: poetry

© Claire Chesnier & Julie Perin

Interview for alternatif-art.com