La revue
FABIENNE VERDIER
A TOPOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINARY

Born in 1962, Fabienne Verdier began her career as an artist with studies at the School of Fine Arts in Toulouse. An academic path that provided her with solid foundations, but which, according to her, lacked the necessary openness. She lamented the limitations of this education and aspired to a different form of beauty, to a poetry of simple lines, to a just and powerful art.

Irresistibly drawn to China, and after a long administrative battle, she settled in the remote province of Sichuan at the age of only 22. This is when her true education finally began, the one of a lifetime: learning the art of Chinese calligraphy. She surrounded herself, not without difficulties, with the greatest masters of the region; and what was initially meant to be a short journey ended up being 9 years of total immersion for the young painter. Beyond the harshness of living conditions in the heart of a China still under communist influence (less than 10 years after Mao Zedong's death), she also had to absorb an entire culture, a language with multiple dialects, and a completely radical worldview.

Through her various teachings, she learned to understand the movements of water, nature, trees, and stones. She studied the profound aesthetic nature of things, beyond appearance, which she manifested on her canvases through her brush. She ultimately paid sincere homage to the lively material, to the inherently changing existence of her subjects.

Back in France, she combined the verticality of Chinese calligraphy with the monumentality of European painting. Crafting herself an immense brush made up of more than 10 horse tails, she became the choreographer of a wise ballet in which ink, canvas, and gravity were the main actors.

"I have always been fascinated by the vertical. By working in this way, the law of gravity finishes shaping the material. Consequently, the result can only be in harmony with the forces of nature. Because all the shapes that arise on earth are shaped by this same law of gravity. Thus, the painting flows and dries like the greatest rivers in the world, for example."_
- Fabienne Verdier_

These two canvases, dated 2017 and both named Tectonique, are emblematic of her work in recent years, abandoning "figurative" subjects to focus on a search for the ethereal, the incorporeal. Imagining the natural forces present at every moment around us, Fabienne Verdier traces these lines in the same way that vibrations caused by the breaking of the earth's crust draw an abstract landscape on the seismograph. These works seek above all to give shape to the intangible, beyond its scientific measure and intellectual understanding.

Profoundly emotional, these paintings also play on the viewer's perception and interpretation of the subject. These forces can be visually translated in many ways, all legitimate readings since they inherently carry a subjective value.

Thus, these tectonics represent as much a topographic relief as a rock fissure, a sound wave, or the retreat of the ocean on the beach. Mist over the moorland or crevasse in the rock, the universality of these works gives them a sublime aspect, shedding the somatic to directly touch the affect.

For Fabienne Verdier, the reality of things is not physical but internal, and the artist is only the vessel through which this energy, this thought materializes. Everything then becomes nothing but ambivalent nature, sometimes sublime, sometimes dangerous, playing with nuances and oppositions, combining curves with straight lines and warm colors with cold colors.

The blood-red stands out from the deep blue like an open wound, revealing all its complex beauty. The jerky brushstrokes follow one another, drawing a complex and organic pattern. Like a force field, these canvases have a presence, a spiritual existence of their own.

These twin canvases seem to interact with each other, and with the world, in a constant dialogue; an aesthetic gymnastics expressing the ineffable and materializing the invisible.

FABIENNE VERDIER  (née en 1962)
Tectonique, 2017
Encre, pigments et vernis sur toile montée sur panneau
Ink, pigments and varnish on canvas mounted on panel
178 x 118 cm
70 5/64 x 46 29/64 in.

PROVENANCE
Collection privée, Belgique
Estimation on demand

FABIENNE VERDIER  (née en 1962)
Tectonique, 2017
Encre, pigments et vernis sur toile montée sur panneau
Ink, pigments and varnish on canvas mounted on panel
178 x 118 cm
70 5/64 x 46 29/64 in.

PROVENANCE
Collection privée, Belgique
Estimation on demand

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