Fabienne Verdier: The Spirit of Painting: A Tribute to the Flemish Renaissance

Four years prior to the event, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges offered Fabienne Verdier a tremendous challenge: to work from the collection’s masterpieces from Van Eyck to Memling and exhibit the results of her research in the museum’s galleries.  Even if her many years of calligraphy training in China had given the painter a solid mastery of ink and brush, in principle that experience seemed to share little in common with the world of the Flemish masters. Yet Fabienne Verdier would eventually discover the contrary: “Throughout the slow process of contemplation preceding this work, I came to understand how the Flemish masters had invented a new relationship in the West, both physical and mental, between man and nature, and how that relationship mirrored the philosophical and aesthetic teachings that the Chinese men of letters had passed on to with me during my ten years in China.”