Fabienne Verdier- Retables, Waddington Custot, London - Flipbook - Page 18
THE BRUSH
AND THOUGHT
Each day, after the physical exertion of her creative work, Fabienne Verdier
spends her afternoons in the library she created in what was once her first
studio in this village in the Vexin. In notebooks that she both illustrates
and annotates, she reflects on her works in progress, documenting analogies between science, literature, philosophy and art history. Through this
process, she deepens and clarifies her understanding of the essence she
strives to express. This is how Verdier hones the precision of her movements and nourishes her creative process. The emptiness she requires in
the morning to commence painting gives way, at midday, to free cogitation.
One might simplify this by saying the mind exercises after the body. But
is it really that simple? Can action be so cleanly separated from thought?
And what is thought? Is it merely the conscious production of the brain,
or does it operate beyond the spheres of reason? Each tentacle of an octopus has a brain of its own, proving that the body is engaged by thought –
thought that is both abstract (non-verbal) and concrete (practical). Our sixth
sense, of which we are so little aware, is nevertheless one most useful to us:
proprioception is our ability to perceive our body in space. Isn’t movement a
way of expressing what our intellect synthesises with numbers and words?
If so, how does communication between the body and mind occur? Between
mornings in the studio and afternoons in the library? Is there even a boundary between these two places, between these two times? In calligraphy,
image and meaning merge. Why should action and thought be any different? What Fabienne Verdier absorbs from her reading becomes seamlessly
integrated into her artistic expression. Through this irreducible fusion,
Verdier’s creation touches us deeply: there is no centre, nothing is closed
off, and everything is interconnected. In an early text imagining Ruskin’s
last visit to a Rembrandt exhibition, Proust describes the paintings in the
room as an assembly of thoughts. When I read this passage, I envisioned
the works stirring like carnivorous plants, chewing over and ruminating
on their own contents. This was not dead matter; our gaze as living beings
reanimates the spirit that generated them. This concept truly resonated
with me. Painting could be both matter and energy simultaneously. Better
still, Fabienne Verdier’s works were bathed in a flow from which they were
not isolated. Everything composing reality worked in concert, with thought
circulating in all directions; this interplay gives life its substance.
When I entered Fabienne Verdier’s library, my attention was immediately
drawn to the collection of brushes she had used during her long apprenticeship in China. There they were, suspended before my eyes like dormant
performers, survivors of those legendary years. I began to imagine them in
action, inventing a story for each one. Though I had no direct connection
with them, I gazed in fascination, fully aware – thanks to my knowledge
of the artist’s experiences – of their revolutionary power. Through her
account of her years at the Chongqing School of Fine Arts in Sichuan
province, I understood the profound transformation these slender objects
brought about in her, shaping her relationship with the world and her art.
On returning from China, Fabienne Verdier endured a long and challenging period of transition as she sought to assimilate her learnings into an
ever evolving artistic approach. She had found the matrix of her pictorial
language but was still searching for a way to use it. Even speaking French
had become difficult; the Latin alphabet felt like a series of fossilised signs
she could barely verbalise. Her references had become blurred, and she had
to relearn how to use her language and reinvent her place within her native
culture. I looked at these brushes as the relics of an extraordinarily powerful experience. Seeing them so serene, it’s hard to imagine the propitious
tsunami they had induced. And yet it was indeed they that had altered the
nature of her thought.
In Chinese aesthetic tradition, the flow of paint across the flat canvas
mirrors the energy of Earth’s gravity. The goal is not to depict what exists
but rather that which brings existence, to embody the unseen forces that
18
Rembrandt
The Artist in his Studio
c. 1628
Collection of brushes
in the library
