Ten Years of China
Fabienne Verdier studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, refused to paint « busts of Beethoven », and left for Sichuan in 1983. For ten years, with Huang Yuan and other masters who were rejected by the Cultural Revolution, she learned the vertical brush, the breath, the unique stroke. Passagère du silence recounts this initiation. Back in France in the 1990s, she set up a workshop in Val-d’Oise, then expanded the tools to dozens of kilos of horsehair brushes, sometimes guided by a bicycle handlebar.
The gesture as a law of gravity
The canvas is often on the floor. Black, in the learned tradition, contains all the colors; gray, gold, and vermilion backgrounds prepare the line. Black gray from your collection belongs to this family: meanders, furrows of horsehair, drips. She dialogued with the Flemish primitives in Bruges, with Cézanne in Aix, with music and astrophysics. The Walking Paintings and the Vortex pursue technical invention.
An East-West transmitter
Verdier is today one of the most visible French painters internationally. His abstraction is not a dripping à la Pollock: it is a monumentality given to an art of the millennial line. The work seeks the mystery of a single passage of ink.
