Fabienne Verdier L'oeil écoute

Fabienne Verdier returns to Galerie Alice Pauli for the third time in a solo exhibition featuring works inspired by her residency at Juilliard School in New York in the fall of 2014. The fruit of her long-held interest in the universes of music and painting, Verdier has drawn on the experience to expand her search for content within form, for spiritual substance over form itself—embarking on a series of works that seek to bring musical expression face to face with the language of painting.

“The essence of my painting is music. For me, the same internal principle is at work whether I breathe life into song or into a brushstroke.” —Conversation with Fabienne Verdier by Charles Juliet, 2007

“Fabienne Verdier uses the same type of approach for the sounds made by a piano or cello: she quickly pencils in the relative heights, the way the different passages move on from each other, recording at the top of the page a sort of panorama—to use her term—a diagram of time and the emotion produced by the music. Then, after listening again and again to the various motifs, the length of time a vibrating note is held, the ink and brush come into play, transforming the first intuition she noted in pencil into art.”—Introduction to L’Œil écoute exhibition catalogue by Daniel Abadie