Claire Deniau’s practice questions the inescapable addiction to the digital image, and intends, via the seductive power of painting, to re-educate the viewer’s gaze.
Her painting, in-between language and materiality, balance out sensitive intuition and conceptual approach in a playful poetry. The artist’s fascination stands from the subtle balance created between the presence of the painting’s materiality, and its unpredictable emotional effect.
The artist has carefully developed her own technique: the handling of the canvas allows an interplay of textures, which often replaces the brushwork. The evanescent strokes and layers, cracks, scraped impasto, colour experimentation, everything is played out to create this particular space between the visible and the invisible.
Claire Deniau intentionally plays with the relationship between the trio painter/painting/viewer. To do so, she also embraces installation, interaction and sculpture as well as drawing, etching, video and artist books.
Her projects are a reaction against the viewer’s disconnection from a physical interaction. Today the average time for a visitor to look at a painting in a museum is 15 seconds, mainly through the screen of a digital device. This absence of time spent in front of a work of art, leaves no space to really engage with it and to open oneself to another kind of dialogue – the one that triggers dreams, imagination and a sense of otherness.
Claire Deniau with a subtle sense of humour, aims at capturing the viewer’s attention, in order for him/her to interact directly via the body, the senses, this with no interference. She creates a challenging and unsettling space, in which these potentialities are explored, in many propositions held out to free the viewer’s imagination.