When I ask her how she paints, Claire Chesnier says that she does not want to answer the question, and prefers to remain silent on the subject. This attitude, apart from her refusal to reduce her art to technical procedures to which too precise an answer would attract undue attention, also says something about the quality of this work: its resistance to unveiling. As indiscreet as my question may seem, given her flat refusal to answer, it remains no less interesting, because this refusal also says something about what her work evokes in me. Why, in front of this work, do I not only want to look, but also to understand? What is it, in the way this painting manifests its presence, that so fascinates me that I want to know what I cannot decipher: the gestures behind such a unique appearance?

To encounter the work of Claire Chesnier is to experience a different kind of presence: something is there, whose presence and impact I perceive without being able to name its nature. It is undoubtedly this tension between the power of this personal encounter, in which the work asserts its uniqueness as a work, and the enigma of its nature, that led me to my question. How can I, in one and the same moment, have the contradictory experience of the obvious and the enigmatic? So when I write about Claire Chesnier, trying to find the right words to describe the ensemble of contradictory sensations, I need to overcome the principle of non-contradiction, which makes us believe that a thing is either this or that. But Claire Chesnier’s painting—and this is precisely its essence and singularity—is, at every moment, a way of giving the oxymoron a form that is both visible and obvious. Obvious because the first thing that comes to mind, like an observation that only needs to be named, is that it is there. And as for what it is...

Let us begin, perhaps, with one of the first sensations: the space here oscillates between two poles, something empathetic that makes you feel as if you could nestle into it; something matte that reminds those who dream of restoring a lost unity, that every painting (even and especially if it is made of paper mounted on Dibond) is a screen on which, if you try too hard to get too close to it, you end up missing it. The whole business, the whole work of the artist is to find that rightness, the balance point between depth and screen, just as it is the artist’s job to master the fine line between concealing and revealing. 

A veil, even more than a painting; her painting is undeniably so because of its ability to create a translucent surface effect, like the fine curtain formed by water in a waterfall. But it is also something else that gives this diaphanous presence its full meaning, far removed from any abstract formalism. As Claire Chesnier puts it, “There must be a body,” without which there can be no question of presence. Certainly not a figurative body, for here the figure remains as veiled as the modalities of the artist’s practice. But an experienced body: that of the painter as well as that of the person standing in front of the painting. In front of Claire Chesnier’s work (and perhaps it is this, after all, the first thing I feel), I have the feeling that I am standing. It is as if the verticality of the work has summoned and made possible my own. It is as if, above all, the way in which the artist has spent hours physically testing the laws of gravity, by accompanying the colored ink on its journey from top to bottom on the support, makes the work the site of a hidden imprint—veil and memory in one.

However, since there is always a however in the face of this work, I could write that I am dealing with horizontality when I stand in front of a work by Claire Chesnier. As if, in this liminal space between painted and unpainted, that gradually takes shape as the ink flows downwards, a kind of landscape emerges. To say landscape is probably already too much, but what else can I call my feeling? Above all, let us say that there is an expanse here, and that the breath, the rhythm that animates this work, undoubtedly comes from this double play between the verticality of the body and the vastness of the world. Let us say, moreover, that if there is an expanse, then it is cancelled out by the incision that the work makes at the border, a border that is all the sharper for its delicate surface. An expanse contained within a border is what Aristotle defined as a place. Voilà, I am standing in front of a place. From now on, it is a question of giving up trying to understand how it came about in order to experience it better.




Translation Laurie Hurwitz. Text by Pierre Wat for "Par espacements et par apparitions" (By spaces and by appearances), L'Ahah, 2021, and published in Claire Chesnier, Ed. JBE Books, 2024. Coed. Ceysson & Bénétière, Pascaline Mulliez Endowment Fund, L’ahah, CCC-OD, with the support of ADAGP.