Fabienne Verdier: the painter reimagining Cézanne country
For a decade, Fabienne Verdier lived in China studying under Huang Yuan, a Sichuanese calligraphy master and landscape painter. Now, back in her native France, the abstract artist is following in the footsteps of another master as three leading institutions in Aix-en-Provence open major exhibitions tracing her journey, from a nomadic artist’s workshop to paintings recently created in the landscape immortalised by Cézanne
Walking through Aix-en-Provence, it’s easy to see why Paul Cézanne painted the landscapes that surround this medieval French city so obsessively. The city’s most famous son painted Provence landscapes as if driven by internal demons. In doing so, he revolutionised the ideals of perspective that had held sway since the Renaissance. It was eventually the death of him. In October 1906, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working en plein air. With the painting nearing completion, he carried on working for a further two hours. He collapsed on the way home, was carried to his bed by a passing stranger, and died of pneumonia less than a week later.
From a vantage point in the Saint-Pierre cemetery where he is buried, visible just a few miles east of the city, lies the Sainte-Victoire mountain range. These are Cézanne’s mountains: they’re lush yet rugged, both fertile and barren. As the day grows old the light can change momentarily as it passes the mountain face, from cruel and hard to ethereal and light. Painting this, giving the mountain depth and shape in a way that seems to alter depending on which angle you look at the canvas, gave birth to Cézanne’s now iconic maxim: ‘To treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone’.
Cézanne would occasionally paint with just a palette knife, a technique he had developed during his Dark Period in Paris. The Eblish artist Lawrence Gowing has written that Cézanne’s palette knife phase ‘was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment’.
Mont Sainte-Victoire opened the door to post-impressionism, and, from there, abstract expressionism. It’s fitting, then, that one of France’s leading contemporary abstract expressionists, and a proud citizen of Aix-en-Provence, is sharing a gallery with Cézanne’s pioneering paintings. Yet Fabienne Verdier’s rendering of the Sainte-Victoire landscape has pushed forward the artistic language of landscape once again. For it’s a language of the globalist age, one rooted in the dedicated study of an artistic culture far from her own.
Verdier was born in Paris in 1962. As a student, she studied Chinese at Paris’ Institut National des Langues et Civilisation Orientales. Yet she grew dissatisfied with the narrow prism of exposure the school provided to Chinese art. In 1985, at the age of 22, she journeyed alone to China – ‘I was the first French artist to do,’ she says over lunch in a courtyard in Aix-en-Provence. She intended to stay for a month, but remained in China for more than ten years, up to and beyond the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Verdier initially studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, before becoming an apprentice to Huang Yuan, a Sichuanese master artist. Huang Yuan, she says, ignored her for much of her apprenticeship. Each evening, she would lay her efforts outside the door of his home. He would never acknowledge her, nor provide any feedback. But Verdier was told by a fellow student that, after dark, he would take her paintings from the doorstep and study them at night.
