Fabienne Verdier

Waddington Custot, London

Private collection, United States

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Cercle sur Bleu Giotto brings together two references that Verdier invokes separately in other works, but which find here a particularly direct formulation. The circle is one of the fundamental forms of Zen calligraphy, the ensō, executed in a single, continuous movement of the body, without the possibility of revision. “Giotto blue,” meanwhile, refers to the intense ultramarine that covers the vaults of the Scrovegni Chapel, painted around 1304: an almost monochrome, saturated blue that, in Giotto’s work, functions as a universal ground.

Executed in 2011, the work belongs to a period in which Fabienne Verdier explores the tension between the gestural language inherited from her training in China and references to early European painting. That the circle is inscribed onto this specific ground, chosen as much for its historical resonance as for its chromatic intensity, is not incidental: both elements share a similar formal economy, a comparable capacity to convey something essential through minimal means.

Born in Paris in 1962, Verdier left Europe in the early 1980s to settle in Sichuan province, where she studied for over a decade with master calligraphers. This foundational training informs her entire practice, shaping her approach to gesture, tool, and surface. Painted in oil on a large scale, Cercle sur Bleu Giotto (Circle on Blue Giotto) reflects a practice in which East and West do not oppose one another but enter into dialogue, each offering a distinct way of conceiving pictorial space.