Clédia Fourniau

Clédia Fourniau conceives her work as an archaeology of the colored layer, of transparency and light. Painting questions the connection between body and space, and the conditions of perception and reception of an image.

She works flat and accompanies the liquid material by lifting her canvases stretched on wooden panels. Dyed in the mass, the layers obtained from dyes and acrylic inks are mixed in a random way. She then freezes them with a polyurethane resin (commonly used to varnish the hull of boats). This resin brings to the object-painting such a brilliance that the surrounding space is reflected in it, as in a mirror.

The vivid palette plays on this ambiguity of the work, between a piece of silverware and a radioactive block. These small artworks can be placed like books in a library: everyone can touch them, mirror themselves in them. She questions the gesture and the nature of the work “between painting in volume and flat sculpture”.

The process is the work, and the formal result is not the only issue at stake. Clédia Fourniau does not seek to fix or finish a painting, resulting in an all-over work entirely made up of overlaps, repentances that never end. In a work always serial, almost in assembly line, the paintings are carried out simultaneously, and are referenced by series numbers.