Fabienne Verdier- Retables, Waddington Custot, London - Flipbook - Page 12
ENTERING
THE DANCE
“That’s all a painter is,” declared Philip Guston, “an image maker, is he not?”.
I read this obvious yet provocative remark on the wall of the beautiful
recent exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Guston is surely right and it is useful
to be reminded of this. Let me add that an image is a vision, not a concept.
Moreover, it seems to me that if an image is reduced to a concept, or is
even the offshoot of a concept, which could just as easily be formulated in
a sentence, then, as an image, it is singularly impoverished. What matters
– what should matter – to the painter is increasing the powers of the image
produced. For an image is a thing, yet a thing that acts. Donald Judd was
not mistaken when he described his works as existing halfway between
things and beings. Or Richard Serra, for whom sculpture was not an object
to look at but an experience to undergo. Of course, you will say, sculptures
are no longer images but things in three dimensions.
However, an image – in its concern to affect our senses more strongly – can
attempt to escape the mere two dimensions which its original planarity
restricts it to.
When frescoes were freed from walls or vaults and affixed to panels or
canvases they became furniture, thereby transportable, and, as a result,
capable of being privatised. A new period of art history opened. Altarpieces were born from the custom, which developed in the 11th century, of
placing relics and, soon thereafter, painted or sculpted images behind the
altar table in churches. Whence came the expression: retro tabula altaris. Because of its prominent position in the centre of the apse, the altarpiece focuses attention. All gazes converge towards it, are welcomed and
embraced by it. And the move from wall frescoes to panels, as well as the
invention of mobility, leads to an increased number of articulated planes:
diptychs, triptychs (whose very number evokes sacredness) and polyptychs,
which allow a narrative to unfold.
In 2022, Fabienne Verdier was invited by Frédérique Goerig-Hergott, at the time
director of the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, and Thierry Cahn, president of
the Schongauer Society, to present an exhibition in the Ackerhof, an extension
of the museum, designed by the architects Herzog & de Meuron. Her proposal
consisted of seventy-six identically sized paintings, each inspired by the luminous circle haloing the body of Christ in the Resurrection depicted on one of
the panels of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, the treasure of this museum.
Did her diligent visits to this altarpiece over a period of several months
induce the artist to adopt this form for her own work, a central panel flanked by two mobile panels? Fabienne Verdier’s images are not narratives.
She tells no story. However, her gesture creates a trajectory animated by
movement, speed and energy. From left to right, we read the development of this gesture traced by the paintbrush on the background. With
the two lateral panels, whose background colour often differs from that of
the central panel, this impression of reading and this sentiment of action
in the image are more forcibly materialised. Fabienne Verdier had often
already marked the scansion of her panels with a thin black vertical line.
Here she takes a new step: the vertical line becomes a fold.
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