Claire Deniau

The painting is a gentle accumulation of an artist’s involvement as much as her nagging desire to step back from a leading role. Arriving in a sensitive and yet assured state, out of dilemma and internal discussion, Deniau paints curves, points, objects, and moments upon an already far from neutral ground. By starting with an anti-indulgent, tentative, awkward, and yet clever relation to color, by also denying an obvious gestural associative mark making, the artist still hopes to be surprised by what she sees she has done. With sound and voice steady rather than strident in tone, somewhat ‘all over’ in direction, nothing appears to come forward. By using a developed inexactitude, or diffidence, not wanting to lay down a law of any sorts, the recent paintings appear as a sum of complex contradictions that hope to go beyond individual understandings of touch, instinct and result.

By avoiding  any virtuoso painterly sweep of movement, and then giving in to what does actually appear, the artist seems to turn her back on expectation seemingly unbothered by formal language. Undermining a sense of ease, however, moving from inside the body of work to stepping back outside it, the discipline of thought over feeling, understanding overindulgence, and art over self, leaves work situated in a place where the artist is still able to wonder whether something is going to work.

For the artist as both observer and maker, both inside and outside the process the discipline of thought over feeling and general understanding over apparent indulgence, will always indicate the value of art over self.  The artist produces a generous spread of ambition and drive, with the rules, attitude, and education of her Western post Post-Modern context. Recognizing the past, Deniau wants to register a part in the present, as well as the relation to time spent in the making of a work. The work appears to play out a strange tentative relation to what comes first and what last, and what can be understood at the same time. A shift in emphasis between subject and ground, and back again, till the subject is not purely winning but a result of the time spent making and looking, reminds that to be satisfied is death, and yet to be calm is quite useful.

© Sacha Craddock

Art critic and curator, London

May 2025