FABIENNE VERDIER (née en 1962) - Lot 72

FABIENNE VERDIER (née en 1962) * Cercle - Ascèse, 2007 Ink, pigments and varnish on canvas mounted on panel, signed and titled on reverse 183 x 135 cm 72 3/64 x 53 5/32 in. Fabienne Verdier Fabienne Verdier started her apprenticeship in Chongqing in the 1980s, after four years spent at the Beaux-arts de Toulouse. There she discovered a spontaneous approach to painting and its subtle aesthetic codes, to which she quickly adhered and which she integrated into her own artistic practice. Her work is the result of many years of study, and a true cultural crossbreeding, making her the heir of the latest great Chinese printmakers. Straddling modernity and tradition, Europe and Asia, she creates a universe of her own, a style that evokes a form of absolute, of universality. She produces an organic, living painting, which represents natural and invisible forces, and reconciles contemporaneity and transmission. Fabienne Verdier works on the monumental, on large formats for which it is the entirety of her body that creates the movement with which her brush moves on the colored canvas. If Fabienne Verdier's practice is particularly focused on notions of space, notably when she represents the fjords in Norway, the mountains in China, or the Sainte-Victoire, it is here the search for a non-space that she evokes. Named Circle - Asceticism, the painting refers to a form of physical deprivation, of disregard for the body in order to concentrate on the spiritual, on the immaterial. The circle therefore represents an open door to the ethereal world, as well as a rejection of tangible existence. Her intervention on the brush and on the canvas is only a vessel, a transition from a physical manifestation to a metaphysical production. She climbs onto the canvas to produce a perfect circle, an idea she derives from a vision she had of a tadpole jumping into a pond and the perfect circles produced by the wave. Like the whirling dervish, whose dance of concentric movements leads to trance, this circular movement that she produces evokes a deep and personal reflection. The circle is a symbol of unity, of infinity, it evokes natural perfection and the absolute. The splashes of paint around the outline of the circle bring the viewer back to the materiality of the canvas, and to its organic aspect. Far from erasing imperfections, Fabienne Verdier integrates them as an indispensable component of her work. The circle remains open, unfinished. If the circle represents infinity, then the broken circle is a universe of possibilities: a world that is not closed, but instead is turned outward. It represents a mind in conversation with the energies around it, in collusion with nature and with others. The circle is an asceticism, but far from cutting itself off from the world, it reconnects with it and communicates on a spiritual level. It is a metaphysical exchange. Ultimately, Fabienne Verdier's paintings are the result of pure, spontaneous, yet thoughtful and elaborate movement, the product of which always carries a certain proportion of the unexpected, touching on something profoundly real: a form of cosmic perfection.