On the wall of the exhibition hall, stretched at the four corners by a nail, the sheets arch their edges. They do not offer the calm surface of a flat plane. Their edges nervously mark the arcs as stigmata of their origin and transport. They have been rolled. This is their first distinctive feature. Claire Chesnier paints her large paintings on sheets that oppose her with a body in tension.

In front of the wide strip of unrolled paper, she chooses her format, prepares her gaze, cuts it out, takes hold of the white screen that curls up on itself, and seizes it. She knows nothing yet about painting. At arm's length, from an impossible distance, at the top of the board on a slightly inclined ladder leaning against the wall, she presses the sheet down. Beneath it, she could see the dark and variegated color of the successive ink flows of her previous paintings, but she does not see it. She checks its height, the physical relationship it has to her own body, its balance and level, then secures it with adhesive tape. The screen faces her, white without limits, or rather without the limits covered by the adhesive tape placed around the entire perimeter of its format, thus removing any possibility of inscribing her work in a composition linked to the final format.

Before painting, she washes the sheet, dampens it. She soothes it. She prepares the flow of the ink, its diffusion, and ensures that her future brushstrokes will not emboss the paper or scarify it.

She looks at the sheet, lets it dry and stretch. From this tension, the four covered edges, and the impossibility of composing the format as a whole, the design of a painting detached from the edge emerges. The adhesive tape frame will slide from the perimeter toward the center.

Determined, she draws the opening of the work to come with adhesive tape on the sheet. She dances, freed from the composition, a form inscribed by the gravity of her arm or by the decision that changes it. She encases the body of the drawing with the palm of her hand and checks that the thick frame of her window is one with the paper. Inside, her painting will open up to the extent of a fragment. Outside, she will leave a space untouched, without limits, a fragile awareness of the impossibility of painting. This reserve will border the painting, without anecdote.

Inside her window, she deposits the highly pigmented ink that fills her brushes, landing in velvety powder, with broad back-and-forth strokes that barely touch the surface. Her repeated gestures would lift the flower from the paper if she did not watch over its integrity and take care to leave nothing in her work that might betray it. She goes over and over the top of each new shape, leaving nothing of the shadow that appears on the screen, making sure that the edge of the color on the horizon is just right, then accompanying the ink in its fall with the regular wave of her gesture. She erases the first drips to create, without a trace of her passage, a smooth covering of the surface, an expansive plane of unidentifiable color. Her grays are silvery, her ochres green, and her greens golden. They caress the body in light with an earthy color and a flat depth, in the deliberate indeterminacy that gives them life.

With the window completely painted, Claire Chesnier steps back. She ventures for the first time to contemplate the landscape she has created. She considers it with the uncertainty of a gaze resting on something improbable. She dares to wonder what her painting will really be like without this chaotic frame, the white rediscovered. She moves closer, looks closely at the surface, watches for an incident, a snag, a particle of ink too thick that could have marked its extent, and seeing nothing, rediscovers its totality.

She wonders what happened this time. She looks at the edge of the words and, not knowing how to name its color, decides to let it dry. Which she does, just enough to be able to remove the speckled tape and the protective sheets surrounding it.

She meticulously removes the adhesive tape from the window, taking care not to damage the fibers of the paper, gently pushing back with her fingernail those that have lifted too much. The white is there. Unscathed.

That.

It's there too. The frame remains, but that's okay. We'll see... At least it's there.

The painting is there. On the floor. It's strange. It takes some getting used to.

The wall is long. Long enough for six large formats. We'll walk along it, moving from one to the other. Walking. So she constructs the movement of the gaze. Fluid. Smooth. Each painting must support the others, withdraw and at the same time become the one we are looking at.

Just below the gaze, the body of the painting dances. In the hollow of infinite temporality, in the gush of expectation, the moment extends into duration, Claire Chesnier has just laid down her gesture.