Carnets (2017-2022)
Edited by Alexandre Vautgaerden
This volume, the first of a two-book set, collects about one hundred plates from the diaries of Fabienne Verdier: collages, drawings, and texts flow and overlap, echoing one another, illustrating this artist’s creative process. These are notebooks put together by Fabienne Verdier over the past five years (from 2017 to 2022), in parallel with her pictorial work, and in them you will find impulses, ideas waiting to be developed, and reflections, as well as Verdier’s unending dialogue with the works of other artists, writers, and scientists. This volume, edited by Alexandre Vanautgaerden, was conceived as an open proposal that allows for an alternate reading of the history of art stemming from analogy, an aspect that makes it possible to renew our point of view on nature. The texts were not merely transcribed, but enriched with comments by the artist herself.
Fabienne Verdier is a French artist whose work is strongly influenced by her encounter with the thought patterns of different periods and cultures. Her creative process is rooted in the hybridization of knowledge and becomes manifest in technical inventions such as enormous panels and combinations of enamels. Her works are present in many collections, among which the MNAM Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musée Granet (Aix-en-Provence), the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Munich), and the Fondation Hubert Looser and the Kunsthaus in Zurich.
In 2019, 5 Continents Editions published the volume Fabienne Verdier. Sur les Terres de Cézanne, which accompanied a retrospective at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence exploring her career from her return from China to the works produced for the quarry of Bibémus that dominates the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. In 2022, the same publisher produced the catalog for the exhibition Fabienne Verdier. Le chant des étoiles | The Song of Stars held at the Musèe Unterlinden of Colmar between October 1, 2022 and March 27, 2023, as well as Corinna Thierolf’s essay Rainbow-Paintings | Fabienne Verdier.
Alexandre Vanautgaerden is a historian and an art historian. He has worked for and directed several cultural institutions (both museums and libraries) in Belgium, Switzerland, and France. He has published a number of volumes on humanism and on Erasmus of Rotterdam. He is now studying the evolution of spaces devoted to exhibitions in relation to the development of digital projects and the restitution of items belonging to the African cultural heritage. He has curated several exhibitions and edited three volumes of works by Fabienne Verdier. He is Honorary Reader for the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, England.