FABIENNE VERDIER (née en 1962) Lot n° 24

Tectonique, 2017 Ink, pigments and varnish on canvas mounted on panel, bearing the label of the Galerie Alice Pauli on the stretcher, signed, titled and dated on reverse 178 x 118 cm - 70 5/64 x 46 29/64 in. Born in 1962, Fabienne Verdier began her career as an artist by studying at the Beaux-Arts school in Toulouse. It was an academic course that provided her with a solid foundation, but one that she felt lacked openness. She deplored the limitations of this teaching and already aspired to another, purer form of beauty, to the poetry of simple lines, to an art that was both accurate and powerful. Irredeemably drawn to China, and after a long administrative battle, she settled in the remote province of Sichuan at the age of 22. It was then that she finally began her genuine, lifelong apprenticeship in the art of Chinese calligraphy. She surrounded herself, not without difficulty, with the region's greatest masters, and although her journey of initiation was only supposed to last a short while, in the end it took the young painter 9 years of total immersion. In addition to the harsh living conditions in the heart of a China still under Communist influence (less than 10 years after the death of Mao Zedong), she also had to immerse herself in a whole new culture, a language with multiple dialects and a completely radical conception of the world. Through her various teachings, she learned to understand the movements of water, nature, trees and stones. She studies the profound aesthetic nature of things, beyond their appearance, which she manifests on her canvases through the intermediary of her brush. In the end, she pays sincere homage to the living matter, the intrinsically changing existence of her subjects. Back in France, she combined the verticality of Chinese calligraphy with the monumentality of European painting. Making herself an immense brush out of more than 10 horse's tails, she becomes the choreographer of a skilful ballet in which ink, the canvas and gravity are the main actors. These two canvases from 2017, both called Tectonique, are emblematic of her work over the last few years, abandoning 'figurative' subjects in favour of a search for the ethereal, the incorporeal. Imagining the natural forces that are always present around us, Fabienne Verdier draws these lines in the same way that the vibrations caused by the breaking of the earth's crust draw an abstract landscape on a seismograph. Above all, these works seek to give form to the intangible, beyond its scientific measurement and intellectual understanding. Deeply emotional, these canvases also play on the viewer's perception and interpretation of the subject. These forces can be expressed visually in many different ways, and there are just as many legitimate interpretations, since they intrinsically carry a subjective value. These tectonics represent a relief on a map, a cliff fault, a sound wave or the retreat of the ocean onto the beach. Fog on the moor or a crevice in the rock, the universality of these works gives them a sublime aspect, relieving themselves of the somatic to directly touch the affect. For Fabienne Verdier, the reality of things is not physical but internal, and the artist is simply the vessel through which this energy, this thought, materialises. All is then ambivalent nature, sometimes sublime, sometimes dangerous, playing with nuances and oppositions, combining curves and straight lines and warm and cold colours. The sanguine red stands out against the deep blue like an open wound, revealing all its complex beauty. The rhythmic brushstrokes follow one after the other, creating a complex, 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; aesthetic gymnastics expressing the ineffable and materialising the invisible.