"I like the illuminated material, and even if they are fast movements I like that one perceives there a powerful trail, something not asleep, perspectives, no lights, things which fade, erased by time, so quickly that there is dynamism… ”. It is Thierry Chavenon who speaks of his paintings, in a low voice, with gentleness but seriousness. We enter his world with concern as Hitchcock's camera enters a house or that of Fritz Lang in a city: a house or a city with its reliefs, its intrigues, its thicknesses, its architectural force ... bump into it, looking for a light that you always end up finding. Each of his paintings seems to be the framework of an intrigue, of a mystery to be discovered, of a suspense which would end in a kind of existential anonymity which still opens the door to other shadows of time. The cinema is not far away. Thierry Chavenon spent twenty years there surveying the sets, first as an intern on Luc Besson's Nikita, then on Until the end of the world by melancholy Wim Wenders, until he became Production Designer for the film De l ' other side of the ring road by David Charhon and En solitaire by Christophe Offenstein. With these decorations begins his pictorial work; facing the spotlight, he cunning to bend the brutality of the light, to prefer the shadow to it and make it guess rather than expose it. He explores in himself the passion for the atmosphere that he still opposes to narcissism today. But the cinema is also a hierarchical work, with its teams, with its economic and human constraints which channel the emotions. Even more in the hundred or so advertising films to which Thierry Chavenon has contributed his work. In addition to the excessiveness of the merchandise and its prestige that must always be shed more light, it is also the power of directors of photography such as John Mathieson, Peter Suschitzky, or Vilko Filac, these other demiurges of light, that he meet there. Large South African or American spaces, we are "outdoors in the sky", but also the black light of Berlin or Prague which in the 1990s flew to the markets, hosting European shoots but without denying their Mittel Europa lineage. Before, he likes to talk about his grandmother who bathed family in opera sets, classical music and drawing; She enrolled him at the École supérieure des arts moderne (ESAM) where he trained in architectural rigor and became a decorator. Unless he remembers that his draftsman-designer father, in an architectural firm in Orléans, drew the plans for a residential subdivision straight out of the Bauhaus imagination in which Thierry spent all his childhood. The memories are sometimes arbitrary, the filiations often agreed upon, but yet his career and today his paintings bear witness, almost brutally, to these landmarks. Then Thierry Chavenon wanted to do battle, as they say about essential fights that we always postpone. He began to paint almost like a madman, a hundred canvases. He says his paintings are impulses. He makes a canvas like others get angry. He works by pochade, without sketches as others make trapezoid without a net, without feeling the need for a binding sketch. He paints masses. His brushes should crash into the canvas and leave a large imprint. Without fear. With energy. His universe is marked by a dialectical relationship between black and white. The colors are heard, but muted. We perceive the distant echoes of Action painting, this New York current of the 1950s which did not want to dissociate the gesturality of the work from the forms taken by the painting of certain abstract expressionists. Today Jean-Philippe Therond, in his gallery rue de Saintonge, presents his paintings to us. The last voyage of a naked woman (Memento mori) installs us in The shadow of time. - Jean-Pierre Hassoun, CNRS Research Director
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