Fabienne Verdier- Retables, Waddington Custot, London - Flipbook - Page 22
dichotomy of “transgression-tradition” could find a place. Reality is not
fixed but vibratory, in a perpetual state of becoming. Like Virginia Woolf,
who ceased to believe in the falsity of linear narrative, Fabienne Verdier
turned away from static figuration, finding it too distant from the underlying rhythms she strives to capture: the truth of matter and its continuous oscillation. At The Juilliard School in New York in 2016, while exploring the free graphic transcription of music, she discovered how closely
this supposedly abstract art form mirrors the internal tremors of the
world. Calligraphy had taught her to read between the lines. Attuned to the
subterranean logic of manifestations, she translated the latent patterns
behind the diversity of phenomena into a pictorial language. The result is
figures that defy classification as purely geometrical, realistic, abstract or
metaphorical; they are instead potent and dynamic within the order of the
universe. And nothing gives the painter greater joy than when she learns
that one of her “figures” strikingly resembles a phenomenon observed
by science. The vortex, for example, which she produces spontaneously
in her paintings, mirrors the fundamental structure of atoms. Similarly,
waves appear at every level of physics: sound arises from molecular vibrations in the air, while light is the result of electromagnetic waves. Reality
pulsates with constant motion, like a Munch painting. This poetic insight
is not mere folklore. The lines that Fabienne Verdier conjures from the
void crystallise the underlying energies of the elements, as if artistic creation, aligning with the organicity of life, intimately grasps its essence.
Each motif encapsulates the essence of a whole, where the forces shaping
its written form are in perpetual motion. The interplay between microcosm and macrocosm is omnipresent in the interpretation of Fabienne
Verdier’s work. Through introspection, she penetrates reality like an X-ray
– or, in Schopenhauer’s terms, unveils the “face” of the will hidden beneath
the guise of representation. Since her apprenticeship in China, she has
embraced the principle of nature as sole master. The balance of the world
arises from the precision of its functioning, a harmony we must internalise
to grasp its dynamics. This forms the basis of the analogy: the external
reflects the internal, the rest is a matter of scale. The emerging form seeks
harmony between inner sensations and the external phenomena it manifests. Neither expressive nor conceptual, abstract nor symbolic figuration,
Fabienne Verdier’s motifs resembles lightning: not a representation of a
storm, but a visualisation of the energy coursing through it.
On returning home from visiting Fabienne Verdier, my eyes were unable
to dwell on anything without noticing affinities with her brushstrokes.
As I watched a documentary about the prehistoric cairn at Gavrinis in
Morbihan, I saw the circular, undulating forms I had been looking at
earlier in the artist’s studio, despite the fact that they had been engraved
on stones more than six thousand years ago. Entire walls of this funerary
megalith were covered with arabesques that seemed to converse with the
movement of waves and the mysteries of the sky. In the meantime, my
cat had quietly settled on my lap. All of a sudden, as I stroked it, I was
forcibly struck by the realisation that it had the same zigzagging line on
its jowl as the line running across the surface of a recent work by the
painter, the altarpiece L’Hymne de la nuit (Anthem of the night). The line
begins with a rapid rise before waning for a while, followed by a slight
upturn three-quarters of the way through its movement and then by a real
upturn on the right-hand panel. While this graphic motif carries profound
meaning in what it reveals about a human trajectory, I wondered how it
had found its way onto my cat’s fur. Recalling the curved lines at the Breton
archaeological site, where natural striations in the rock produced similar
effects, it seemed that an intrinsic alphabet of forms existed behind the
living world. These hidden depths may chime with a vibrant sound, but it
requires the keen insight of poets to render them visible.
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Edvard Munch
Anxiety
1894
Fabienne Verdier
Jazz Quintet (detail)
2014
