Each new work in the distinctive painterly medium Claire Chesnier has developed begins with the preparation of the paper support. A roughly life-size expanse is cut from a longer roll, affixed to hardboard, and moistened, a step that requires the utmost care: Opening the paper fibers, it makes the surface more vulnerable to the pressure of the artist’s touch. Next, she mixes large quantities of pigments, diluting a range of dense calligraphy inks with considerable amounts of water. Proceeding intuitively, with the support in an upright position, she brings one highly liquid hue after another to the paper, depositing it there with a loaded brush. The process is at once immersive and physically extenuating, and the painting of a single work can take up to several weeks. Each is titled after its date of completion—for example: 090324 for a painting finished on March 9, 2024. All are mounted on Dibond and framed prior to exhibition.

Particularly in recent years, the results unmistakably conjure the conventions of landscape painting. Lighter veils of color—often nacre, bluish, or roseate in effect—frequently occupy the upper registers, while darker tones are reserved for the lower reaches. The transitions within these respective zones are extraordinarily subtle, even infinitesimal, whereas the liminal areas between them engage bolder contrasts suggesting so many horizons. The thresholds are at times nearly level across the painting’s width; elsewhere, in the works Chesnier informally refers to as “chevrons”—nomenclature doubtless inspired by the more recent history of color field painting, Kenneth Noland’s in particular—the darker region slopes upward to either lateral edge in a V-shape. In no case, however, does the seam appear a clearly demarcated line. Rather, the downward flow of ink consistently leaves behind long striations that, in turn, similarly permit reading in naturalistic terms—as long grasses, say, or distant trees backlit by a setting or rising sun. Such associations are nonetheless unmoored by the fluid handling of the whole: There are no securely graspable things; indeed, there are no things at all.

Chesnier, for her part, readily avows her feeling for the long tradition of landscape depiction and atmospheric observation, from the nineteenth-century cloud studies of John Constable and the plein air beach scenes of Eugène Boudin to the invented seascapes of the contemporary Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda. Yet her paintings do not originate in representational intent, and they cannot be understood simply as vestigial variations on a storied genre. They emerge, rather, from her embodied experience of painting—and the spatial, or indeed place-making, possibilities of color.

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In the first compositions in dilute ink on paper that Chesnier exhibited publicly, and which she created between 2010 and 2012, color appears doubly circumscribed. It is confined, first, to a clearly delimited area within the support, the artist having masked the margins prior to applying the ink. Hemmed in by white space, the forms consistently resist appearing deduced from the painting’s framing edges, eschewing rectilinearity and symmetry in favor of more idiosyncratic, off-kilter silhouettes. That preliminary shaping is in turn prolonged and displaced by the division of color within the painted zones. Here too, different hues are apportioned in ways that suggest a certain willfulness with respect to preexisting edges (in this case, the internal frame formed by masking): Curves are pitted against angles, plumb lines against gentle swells. The bounds between adjacent color areas are often considerably sharper than in the later paintings, and the results admit various associations, including eccentric shields in the larger works and eyes or fans in the smaller formats.

Over the course of 2012, much of this internal drawing falls away in favor of consistently vertical veils, as if Chesnier’s glowing color were dissolving its own boundaries from within. She nonethe- less continues to selectively mask the supports, a gesture she now describes as “authoritarian”—an imposition of limits visibly at odds with the inherent fluidity of her medium. This tension is integral to Chesnier’s most sustained group of paintings with shaped areas, which she unofficially designates as “blades” (lames). Produced between 2013 and 2016 in both small and large formats, these works are characterized by intensely saturated and internally variegated forms that appear simultaneously to be cut out from, and yet dynamically cleaving, their otherwise pristine white grounds. The shapes never recur exactly from one work to another but are instead stretched or attenuated, brought closer to the framing bounds or pulled back from them anew. The very longevity of this painting group suggests the depth of Chesnier’s attachment to this preparatory definition, the formal effects of which oscillate, paradoxically, between quasi-sculptural carving and something akin to photographic cropping.

By contrast, the works Chesnier began making later in 2016 give full reign to fluidity. Color ceases to be confined to a specific zone within the paper and instead occupies the totality of the surface, interrupted only by the framing edges.1 Or to put the same point a slightly different way: Shaping is confined to the inaugural determination of the work’s dimensions. That decision remains residually “subjective.” Unlike other artists she admires, such as Agnes Martin or Ad Reinhardt, Chesnier does not have a standard format but, rather, subtly alters at least one variable—height or breadth—from one work to the next. Just as she had previously adjusted the discrete forms within the fields, never precisely repeating any given silhouette, so she conceives each painting as a specific physical entity. Yet this shaping is determinedly minimal, almost self-effacingly conventional, by contrast with the earlier masking. In another important shift, the paintings are from this moment forward consistently life-size: Initially comparable to the final large-scale blades, which tended to be between 140 and 155 centimeters tall and approximately 135 centimeters wide, they have over the years increased gradually in height, and are now likely to run between 165 and 175 centimeters along the vertical axis.2

Within these newly immersive fields, the landscape-like disposition emerges gradually.3 One discerns a lightening, at first primarily in the paintings’ uppermost reaches, then creeping downward; the lower regions darken as if in response. That darkening is also, increasingly, a grounding or weighting, a perception further enhanced by the sedimented trails of downward-flowing ink. These paintings are visibly pulled by gravity, throughout their making as in their eventual hanging. The color veils, meanwhile, span the surface in increasingly regular side-to-side arrays, nearly identical—but never quite—to left and right.

Yet precisely these same recurrent features might be seen as at least equally attuned to the upright human body: its bilateral symmetry, its headedness and its handedness, its verticality and its groundedness.4 The horizon, on this view, functions less as a representational device than as an index of bodily orientation and equilibrium, situating the beholder squarely before the work.5 Further underscoring their rootedness in embodied experience, these paintings disclose slight but significant asymmetries. The darker, lower zone often rises slightly higher toward one or the other lateral edge, most often the right—an effect recurrent across the thresholds but perhaps most apparent in the chevrons. The propensity calls to mind the lived difference between our right and left limbs and, more especially, our dominant and non-dominant hands. Far from providing views on a world indifferently spread out before us, Chesnier’s paintings suggest the primordial entanglement of body and place. Or perhaps: they refigure embodiment as spaciousness—opening and extension.

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The co-emergence or, as he would say, “compearance” of body and place is a central theme in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. The key text is Corpus, an acknowledged reference for Chesnier. A sustained rethinking of the body inherited in part from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Corpus invites us to confront anew the Cartesian conception of the res extensa. In Nancy’s telling, the body is not indifferently dropped into space, for there is no homogeneous, infinite space; rather, there are only the spaces or indeed places that bodies bring forth: “Bodies aren’t some kind of fullness or filled space (space is filled everywhere): they are open space, implying, in some sense, a space more properly spacious than spatial, what could also be called a place. Bodies are places of existence, and nothing exists without a place, a there, a ‘here,’ a ‘here is,’ for a this.”6

Of special interest here is Nancy’s account of the Cartesian “ego sum, ego existo”: the declaration of existence. Nancy frames that affirmation as a rupture or breakthrough. Yet he also stresses the finitude of the enunciation, its contingency upon discrete circumstance. The ego is at once localized and drawn beyond itself—“‘ego’ being ‘ego’ only when articulated, articulating itself as spacing or flexion, even the inflexion of a site.”7 For precisely this reason, he suggests, such proffering is necessarily iterative, indeed interminable: “For prof-fering ‘ego’ (for thrusting it outside the self, so that there might be a ‘self ’), all places are equally effective, but only as places… I am, every time I am, the flexion of a place, a fold or motion through which it prof-fers (itself).”8 We have to do here not with an ego “in” a body, but with the necessarily embodied being of ego: what Nancy calls “corpus ego.”9

Nancy’s claim that such articulation “happens ceaselessly, every time, in every space of time, in every moment of existing” offers a way of thinking about the simultaneous discreteness and enchainment of Chesnier’s paintings, features we are perhaps more accustomed to describing in terms of the broadly serial impetus of painting since Impressionism.10 Their titling resembles the dating of journal entries, yet the works themselves are resolutely stripped of autobiographical anecdote—indeed, of the conventional painterly hallmarks of authorial presence (emphatic brushwork, impasto, pentimenti…). Certain works produced in quick succession suggest quasi-cinematic sequences: for example, a cluster of works produced between late January and early February 2022 (280122, 020222, 040222, and 060222) evoking a gradual pan across gently sloping but essentially nondescript, if not desolate, terrain (“all places are equally effective…”). Even so, each painting within this group is clearly set off from the others. From one work to the next, minimal tonal variations within a largely shared and relatively sober palette evoke so many distinctions in their internal weather— differences, as it were, of perceived humidity or pressure or temperature, less seen than sensed.11 Elsewhere, by contrast, the decalage between chronologically consecutive paintings is immediately striking. Consider 010922 and 020922, completed on the first and second days, respectively, of September 2022. The former ranges from vivid chartreuse in the upper register to deep purple in the lowest reaches; the latter, from saturated vermillion to subdued veridian. The change in feeling is total, even as the two works are clearly related by their atypically low horizons. This is another variety of continuity-in-difference.

In Chesnier’s paintings, articulation is entirely an affair of color, in its bottomless singularity and inherent plurality. The artist has spoken of the “haptic charge” where colors touch, and that touching takes place at another limit, that of the support itself. Color, here—and here, and here, and there…—is no longer formed; rather, it is delivered into the spacing, folding, or flexion proper to a place. Notably, in her private notebooks, the artist prolongs this articulation by attempting to name the new hues that emerge from the painting process—a theoretically interminable re-wording.

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For many readers, this account of Chesnier’s work and thought will already have conjured Supports/Surfaces, the volatile and shifting collective of painters—Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Marc Devade, and Claude Viallat, among others—active in France in the late 1960s and 70s. In her work, as in theirs, one discerns a clear visual relationship to aspects of post-WWII American abstraction—in particular, in Chesnier’s case, the vertically stacked color blocks of Mark Rothko, the poured veils of Morris Louis, the stripe and chevron paintings of Kenneth Noland, and the sprayed fields of Jules Olitski. And she, too, understands color as inextricably bound in larger questions about subjectivity and the body—issues the Supports/Surfaces painters and their critical champions once argued had been effectively banished from the more “positivist” orientation of American high modernism.12 Her engagement with Nancy’s thinking extends this filiation: Writers in the Supports/Surfaces milieu at times referred explicitly to the early work of Nancy’s later interlocutor and collaborator Jacques Derrida—most notably, his assertion that “the chromatic… is to the origin of art what writing is to speech”: that is, that color is an affair of spacing.13 This conception, as we have seen, lies at the heart of Chesnier’s enterprise.

I nonetheless want to close by considering a handful of paintings that bring us back to the specificity of that practice. Beginning in 2016, coincident with her abandonment of masking, Chesnier has occasionally exhibited works that are created and titled in the same way as her edge-to-edge paintings for the wall but then, in an additional step, displaced ninety degrees and displayed horizontally. In selected gallery presentations, the artist has installed such works on pedestals raised sixty centimeters off the ground, perpendicular to her wall-hung paintings along the same sightline.14 The effect, as captured in installation photographs, resembles a colored fold in three dimensions, the horizontal painting providing something like a runway for the gaze.14. An exception to this staging, displayed much lower to the ground, was the horizontally disposed work Chesnier included in her 2019 contribution to L’art dans les chapelles, at the Chapel de la Trinité, Castennec, Bieuzy.

Yet the recumbent paintings also carry distinctive connotations. Indelibly inscribed with the traces of their upright origins, they reverse the horizontal-to-vertical trajectory so frequently adopted in painting since Jackson Pollock or, closer to Supports/Surfaces, Simon Hantaï, whose abstractions famously were produced on the floor and rotated to the wall. Chesnier’s paintings, by contrast, register as deposed—and indeed, she describes them informally as gisants, in reference to the sculptural tradition of the sepulchral effigy. But these bodies remain wholly singular, which is to say singularly spaced, in what we are invited to imagine as the horizontal extension of the here lies. 15 Prolonging the articulation at work on the walls, they are but further places—further profferings—of finite being.

Notes :

1. Two distinct groups of smaller paintings, from 2013 and 2016, seem to have played an especially important role in preparing this shift to edge-to-edge veils: In both bodies of work, the blade-like forms are at once more nearly rectilinear and more consistently trued and fared to the framing edges, though they remain set off by stark white margins of varied widths.

2. It is telling that, beginning with her move to edge-to-edge color veils, Chesnier’s formats are sorted by medium distinctions. Previously, the artist had made paintings in ink on paper at a range of dimensions, from the very small (formats she would describe as scaled to the face) to the nearly life-size (that is, scaled to the body). Following the abandonment of masking, by contrast, inks are deployed exclusively on large-format papers, whereas smaller dimensions are reserved for monotypes in lithographic ink or, more recently, colored pencils. Not incidentally, the headedness and handedness effects I describe below as defining of the large inks on paper tend to be mitigated in the smaller works in other media, which result from a different bodily relationship to their maker.

3. More precisely, this aspect re-emerges, for the painted zones in many blades similarly register as landscape-like, suggesting views through various apertures. But that resonance appears momentarily scrambled by the qualitative leap to the edge-to-edge works, after which it assumes newfound potency—or so I wish to suggest.

4. The terms “headedness” and “handedness” figure centrally in my account of related effects in the abstract paintings of James Bishop, an artist Chesnier admires; see my “Field Agent: The Art of James Bishop,” Artforum 52:5 (January 2014): 184-89, 234. My discussion here is also indebted to Michael Fried’s “Orientation in Painting: Caspar David Friedrich,” in idem., Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014): 111-49.

5. For a related discussion, see Briony Fer’s account of what she characterizes as the “seam” or “hinge” between the upper and lower zones in Mark Rothko’s late black-and-gray paintings in idem., “Seeing in the Dark,” in Achim Borchardt-Hume, Rothko: The Late Series (London: Tate Modern, 2008), especially 42-43.

6. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15.

7. Ibid., 25.

8. Ibid., 27.

9. Ibid., 25.

10. Ibid. Chesnier, notably, does not consider her work serial, preferring to speak of painting “families” within her corpus (conversation with the author, March 2024).

11. In an interview, Chesnier states that her works are inevitably permeated by the weather proper to the time and place of their making (or as Nancy might put it, the fleeting conditions of the ego sum, ego existo): “My painting is very closely related to certain qualities of temperature, of climate, of color… The relationship is nearly Impressionist… But it’s a connection made after the fact”—a matter, one might say, of something nearer to infiltration than to conscious intent (Thomas Lévy-Lasne, “Les Apparences, épisode 19: Claire Chesnier” [October 2021]. This characterization does not come down clearly on either side of the abstraction/figuration binary as conventionally understood, and indeed, Chesnier is largely uninterested in this distinction, declaring her relationship to these categories “very, very fluid” (conversation with the author, July 2024).

12. For a detailed account of this reception, see my “Tel Quel and the Subject of American Painting: Marcelin Pleynet and James Bishop,” Tate Papers 32 (December 2019).

13. “La chromatique, (…) est à l’origine de l’art ce que l’écriture est à la parole.” This quote, drawn from Derrida’s watershed De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), 1967, serves as one of several epigraphs to Marc Devade, “D’une peinture chromatique. Théorème écrit à travers la peinture” (1970), rpt. in Camille Saint-Jacques, ed., Marc Devade. Écrits théoriques (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1989): 31-51. For an English version, see “Chromatic Painting: Theorem Written Through Painting,” trans. Roland-François Lack, in Patrick Ffrench and Lack, eds., The Tel Quel Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1998): 181-97.

14. An exception to this staging, displayed much lower to the ground, was the horizontally disposed work Chesnier included in her 2019 contribution to L’art dans les chapelles, at the Chapel de la Trinité, Castennec, Bieuzy.

15. I borrow this last bit of phrasing from Nancy, who describes “a writing of the dead having nothing to do with the discourse of Death—only with this fact, that the space of bodies knows no Death (the fantasy of abolished space), but knows each body as a dead one, as this dead one, sharing with us the extension of its here lies” (Corpus, 55). And just here, another comparison comes into view: Yves Klein’s RP3, “Ci-gît l’Espace” (RP3, “Here Lies Space”) of 1960, which photographs indicate he displayed on a wall in his studio but exhibited publicly in a horizontal position. The relationship of Chesnier’s art to Klein’s is a large and rich topic requiring a more detailed analysis than I can provide here; suffice it to say that Klein imagines color—more specifically, intensely saturated monochromy—as a waystation to precisely the infinite, immaterial space Nancy dislocates in favor of discontinuous, heterogeneous places.