Artist: Fabienne Verdier

For the past twenty years, Fabienne Verdier has spent a couple of weeks every year in the Bay of Porto Vecchio, in Corsica. She observes the headlands, the coves, the inlets, the rocky ridges, the gnarled trunks of the pine trees, the sea and the horizon. But she does not merely observe them; one might say that she experiences them, that she immerses herself in them. Almost every day she sails along these wild coastlines, soaking them up and making them her own. To the extent that when these archipelagos of rocks rising from the water reappear in the strokes of her pastel stick (dry pastel for the mineral world, oil pastel for the structure of the trees), the lived experience of the landscape really emerges on the paper.

These are almost like a sculptor’s drawings: essential, uncluttered, minimalist. They appeal to all the senses: one feels as though one can smell the scent of resin, hear the whisper of the wind through the pine needles. And the mythical “silence of the sea” – that flat immensity – is boldly rendered here by a simple collage of blue paper.

Fabienne Verdier was born in 1962 in Paris. She lives and works in the Vexin region, near Paris. Her works feature in numerous collections, including the MNAM Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musée Granet (Aix-en-Provence), the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Munich), the Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), the Kunsthaus (Zurich) and the Hubert Looser Foundation (Zurich). In 2019, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence devoted a retrospective exhibition to her, tracing her career since her return from China. Several major exhibitions have taken place recently, including Mute at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris and Poétique de la ligne at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.