Fabienne Verdier

Waddington Custot, London

Private Collection, United States

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, Fabienne Verdier left for China in the early 1980s, where she spent more than a decade studying traditional calligraphy and painting in Sichuan province. Upon her return to Europe, she developed a practice rooted in this training while engaging in dialogue with Western gestural abstraction, with Franz Kline and Cy Twombly frequently cited in relation to her work. Her works are now held in major public and private collections and are regularly exhibited across Europe and North America.

Around the early 2010s, Verdier began a series of large-scale works in white ink on raw linen that occupy a distinctive place within her oeuvre. The premise is both simple and radical: light ink on an unprimed support reverses the usual relationship between mark and ground, between what absorbs light and what reflects it. Encre Blanche No. 4, executed in autumn 2014, is a particularly accomplished example.

Measuring nearly 183.5 cm in height, the line is executed in a single, irreversible gesture, characteristic of a practice in which nothing can be corrected or reworked. The weave of the linen actively participates in the materiality of the work: the white settles with varying density, and the support ceases to be a neutral surface, becoming an integral part of the composition.