When faced with the works of Claude de Soria and Claire Chesnier, the mind stops its circus of explanations, and magnetic fields hold the body at bay.

Separated by two generations and different practices, sculpture and painting, they share something rudimentary, the scarcity of materials; something pulsating, the seeds of variation; and above all, a kind of latency of perception. Claude de Soria's concrete sculptures are hard and fragile, their grays varying according to the light reflected on their surface, shadows biting into openings or edges; Claire Chesnier's paintings are evanescent and concentrated sedimentations of pigments diluted on cotton paper, mists of color, dark mists, glowing spaces transformed into sensations of cosmos, atmospheres, landscapes.

It is not enough to have few means at hand to sculpt or paint; one must have long gazed at things large and small, simple and complicated, at life within one's reach. And above all, one must remember sensations, reach within oneself a dialogue on the scale of stars, deserts, horizons, or on the scale of raindrops, grains of sand, to the rhythm of the rising and setting sun until nightfall.

There is nothing romantic about these minimal, abstract works. Each one slowly opens up a space-time scene, creating a gaze that is both infinite and intimate. Together, they are a breath of fresh air for eyes in need of contemplation in a world that has been shrunk and confused by the proliferating exhibitionism of images. When everything is on the threshold of screens, Claude de Soria and Claire Chesnier invite us to cross over.

The two share the same desire to slow down the ticking of passing time, the same renunciation of the spectacular image of the contemporary visible. With a curious insistence on touching the untouchable, they approach a beauty that lies elsewhere than in attainable things. The nebulosity of Claire Chesnier's clouds never resembles clouds. And if Claude de Soria's Lame splits space, it is not in the manner of cutting an apple in half, but by populating the space with a multitude of possible orientations. Both work against a receding horizon at a time when nothing ensures a stable relationship between things. The affinity of an infinitely large opened up by an infinitely small. We cannot touch a star or a cloud, but we can hold a pebble or feel the rain running through our fingers. They share a certain conception of beauty freed from worn-out forms and devoid of any desire to capture reality, even in a representation. The means they have chosen, the motifs, the gestures they repeat, their way of inhabiting works that are both horizon and home, everything echoes. This is also what an artist's studio is: a distant and a close, an outside and an inside, a way of moving along an axis between two poles, one open, the other closed.

Both use a binding agent. Claude de Soria uses cement to bind sand, Claire Chesnier uses water to bind ink to paper. A link in the very material that fuses everything together while dismissing the “binding” artists, the drying time. Irreversible links of exothermic reactions and uncontrollable luminous phenomena. An artist is like a drinker of sweet water who waits for the crystals to dissolve and acknowledges the independence of the work and of oneself. Art lives beyond its binders. The binders cannot live without dependence on independence.

Binding and unbinding is thus beauty. Not the philosophical dirty word, just a word equal to a surprise, the renewal of a way of being in space and time. In each, beauty simultaneously expresses what is attainable and what is unattainable. Claude de Soria's “wonder” as she removes the Rhodoid that has enclosed the mixture of materials after drying has added its touch; Claire Chesnier's deposits of time in the inks, as if sedimentation had built up the light particle by particle: what descends and darkens, raising a glow or a sparkle. Beauty is an epiphany that does not resonate with any hidden truth but unfolds temporal singularities, moments of wonder, durations of shimmering.

Insisting with their hands and eyes in the manner of a writer repeating a word in order to disturb what previously made sense, they are capable of turning a land of abundance into a desert, a desert into a fertile land. With a tender poverty of means, with an attentive availability to their medium, they affirm that nothing changes. There is always a day after the night fades away, always the gravity of a body between heaven and earth, always a grain of sand and a drop of water to make a world. There is a touch of eros in this union.

When asked “how is it done,” which is a question that haunts the viewer, one says she is waiting for an answer from the material, the other that the important thing is not there. While we struggle to find answers in art, which has become the voice of a world that has an answer for everything, the works of Claude de Soria and Claire Chesnier play at connecting materials to sensations, the concrete to memory. They have an affinity through their shared experience of being touched by otherness. This means that they are touched by what is waiting to be perceived. And what they expect from the bond that binds them together is a love of absolutely concrete things, of which art is the standard-bearer, far from any metaphysics.

Corinne Rondeau