"At the threshold of Claire Chesnier’s work lies an injunction to silence that is itself silent, profoundly paradoxical: one that leaves us without words, and in the same movement, enjoins us to speech. In this sense, her work could be described, in essence, as a painting of the liminal. Before her canvases, which interlace chromatic power and subtlety, we are overcome by a form of suspended emotion, a contemplative stasis that almost inevitably opens onto what Romain Rolland called an “oceanic feeling”. Following Freud, one may readily strip this feeling of its mystical wings, transforming it here into an impulse towards writing. We find ourselves before a passage, a limit that liberates and calls to us precisely because it is never sharp or cutting, remaining blurred and porous, mingling earth with water, light with darkness, hesitating between the twilight of evening and that of morning. It thus possesses a remarkable power of attraction which, through the infinite variations of colour, saturation, and the seepage of ink layers into one another, draws us at once towards both reconciliation and release: an open surface, an invitation to see.
For a long time, her paintings followed this horizon line through variations in luminous intensity, in keeping with a division in which the lower, darker part responded to the upper, lighter and airier one. When, more recently, I encountered her first “clouded” paintings, I immediately thought of the incomparable skies of John Constable; not that she returns to a Romantic atmosphere, but because, like the English painter, she knows how to reveal that subtle mixture—one might say, in chemical terms—between water and gas, between mist-laden vapours and the palpable weight of water. To paint air as the hallucinatory horizon of painting… With the new inks presented in this exhibition, her work takes a further step in this direction: the picture is no longer composed according to the earlier division; colour now diffuses across the entire surface; the gesture becomes more discernible; the seismographic line of the earlier works has been transformed into broad, profuse volutes, warm circumvolutions that suffuse the space. Perhaps spirits conceal themselves there, playing within the coloured fumes of her radiant intensity—we do not know, and it matters little: our hands and eyes are full, and one would simply like to speak in gratitude.
Her work advances patiently. It is a painting of quiet authority that lays no claim to dominance: a gradual clearing that arises as self-evident, a veil that parts slightly to open onto a world in which my eye participates without exerting control, in the hushed imminence of a presence fulfilled. Claire Chesnier’s paintings breathe the air of the haiku: they share in its union and, like them, receive the sediment of time."
Yannick Mercoyrol, 2026
1 Excerpt from Kobayashi Issa (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Haiku Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido 1952), page 214
