Aix-en-Provence (AFP)

"In France, I was taught figurative painting and easel, in China is painted vertically by introspection". For 40 years, the French painter Fabienne Verdier has pursued her quest for pictorial experiences that has led her to follow in the footsteps of Cézanne.

Already exhibited in London, Singapore or Lausanne, this artist enjoys for the first time a retrospective in France, in Aix-en-Provence. She exhibits her abstract paintings inspired by Chinese calligraphy to her latest works made after an immersion of several months in the landscapes dear to the painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), at the foot of the Sainte-Victoire massif in Provence.

Born in Paris in 1962 into a family she describes as "Catholic bourgeois", Fabienne Verdier had a "very hard to live with" childhood after her parents' divorce. But "art has given meaning to my existence," she adds.

His father, an artist, is the first to teach him painting at six. She has 15 when she leaves Paris to live with him, in the countryside, in the South-West. "It was rough, but I learned a lot," she says.

Passed briefly by the school of fine arts of Toulouse where she "is bored", Fabienne Verdier flies in 1983 for China. She moved to Chongqing, a university town in southwestern Sichuan Province, where she was the only Western student.

She meets her "master" Huang Yuan from whom she learns for 10 years. A difficult life experience she recounted in her book "Passenger of Silence".

In China, Fabienne Verdier learns to paint standing. "We are vertical, with a reserve of color in the brush, it is a different approach".

Back in France, in 1993, she repeated the experiments: "I have enlarged the brushes to make the body work."

She practices "walking painting", walking on canvas. She applies a huge brush of two meters, made of horsehair hung in thick tufts, to a pulley.

To release the gesture, the artist will soon cut the handle. She replaces it with a bicycle handlebar which she manipulates by hand to make it dance above the canvas.

"The invention of new techniques is part of the creative act," says his friend linguist Alain Rey.

- "She becomes a brush" -

"By cutting the handle, putting a handlebar, it becomes the brush, it is fundamental.It allows it to keep the immediacy, the spontaneity of the gesture", adds Bruno Ely, curator of the museum Granet Aix-en-Provence Provence.

It is thanks to him that 30 years after having moved away from figurative painting, Fabienne Verdier decides to leave her studio to paint in a natural landscape and "go back on the motive to see what happens".

Joining her steps in those of Cezanne, she sets up her nomadic workshop, nearly 300 kilos carried on the back of a man and a donkey, on the flanks of Sainte-Victoire.

"I was no longer sleeping, I was looking for a solution to bring my own eyes, to capture the forces at work without painting the figurative representation of the mountain," recalls the artist.

By dint of immersion, Fabienne Verdier "welcomes" the elements that combine with his gesture and brush.

"The wind, the rain, the hail were trying to build fractals in the material of my painting". On a canvas, the mistral dug crevices in the painting.

"Going to the motive, it was a real break in his work," adds Bruno Ely. The artist speaks of "true revolution".

For her paintings of Sainte-Victoire, she chose black. "I wanted to take the lands of the valley of the Arc" near the mountain, where dominate ochres but "I had to destroy everything, we read more in the specter of the black than in the illusion of the color ".

In three of the paintings, the "nocturnes", added to the exhibition of Aix-en-Provence - which continues until January 5, 2020 - a deep cobalt blue dominates.

After Aix and a major exhibition in London in the spring of 2020, Fabienne Verdier plans to "sink into (his) studio to continue exploring the blue mountains, cobalt".

© 2019 AFP