Fabienne Verdier — Energy Fields — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 21 → November 2, 2013

This exhibition follows an earlier exhibition of her works at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges and the St Jean Hospital / Memling Museum as well an exhibition at the Erasmus House in Brussels in homage to the Flemish masters Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Marmion, Memling and Van der Goes.

The Marais space as well as 53 rue de Seine both are devoted to a vast installation of innovative works by Fabienne Verdier : The Walking-Paintings.

The Spirit of painting — Homage to the Flemish Masters

• Marais Space Rive Droite

Having immersed herself for ten years in another culture and learned the importance of intuition to artistic creativity, Fabienne Verdier re-discovered western painting after returning to France. She was especially drawn to the graceful, abstract forms of the great 15th century Flemish masters. Close study of their works has shaped her own way of seeing, but her paintings are original creations. One of the two spaces in the rue de Saintonge will be dedicated to a meticulous study of the headdress in Van Eyck’s portrait of his wife Margareta, one of the earliest European artworks to portray an artist’s wife. This portrait, which occupies an important place in Fabienne’s notebooks, inspired her to create a whole constellation of paintings called La Pensée Labyrinthique (Labyrinthine Thought) or Méandres (Meanders) in thick pastels or in ink on paper and canvas.

To give birth to these Meanders Fabienne Verdier does not hesitate to shorten her paintbrush and graft a bicycle handlebar onto it so as to acquire greater speed in the conquest of space. Sometimes she resorts to white ink, which she obtains by using titanium white, “a very hydrophilic substance found everywhere in the earth’s crust”. “It disperses easily”, she says, “and has a physical density and hardness as well as a luminescent quality owing to a high refraction index”.

A quotation from the Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti sheds light on her use of this substance :

“The summit of art is to know how to use white and black.”

Walking-Paintings — Recent works

• Marais Space Rive Droite and Seine Rive Gauche .

With this series of works in black and white, the artist abandons her usual paintbrush composed of several horse tails for a funnel she saturates with ink to create an effect similar to what normally be obtained with a paintbrush. Walking rapidly over sheets of paper spread out over the floor while guiding the funnel to spill large quantities of ink, she draws lines that criss-cross and ramify in all directions. These Walking-Paintings are a kind of stroll of the artist through a landscape created by her own body, a landscape in total unison with the fundamental electro-magnetic and gravitational forces of the universe.