For five years, Claire Chesnier has been following a constraint she set for herself: she limits herself to creating a colorful shape with sharp contours in the white space of the sheet of paper. Through this gesture—which is above all a “re-veiling,” a covering of the surface with a colored veil—she enters into a dialogue with the fluidity of color and the thick, immaculate “skin” of the paper, making each brushstroke a moment of tension between intensity, amplitude, control, and the letting go of the hand and arm. From there, anything is possible, and a dialectic does indeed take hold: the presence of the form, as if suspended in the middle of a kind of nothingness—like a cutout placed on its perfectly defined base—enters into contradiction, perhaps conflict, with what is happening inside this form, down to the depths of the velvety weave of the paper, which is saturated with diluted inks. For the artist, this is a connection between the “authority” of the edges and the “listening” to the infinite possibilities that unfold within this same form. And this is how the viewer enters into the material: their gaze is lost in the watercolor gradients; they have a perceptive and phenomenological experience of painting, to use Merleau-Ponty's vocabulary. True to the minimalist tradition, Claire Chesnier quotes Ellsworth Kelly and Josef Albers, from whom she beautifully borrows the idea of variation, understood as the repetition of difference.