Nerée, 2023

Caroline de Boissieu  

There is, in Nerée, a struggle that painting does not seek to resolve. Gold and dark do not oppose each other: they cross, they contaminate each other, until the distinction between matter and light loses all relevance. What appears as vague—white foam, dark mass, golden vein—is perhaps just the provisional name given to an older movement: that of matter seeking its own dissolution.

The gesture here does not illustrate the water, it embraces its logic. The touch accumulates, scratches, disperses into splashes that seem to have escaped the control of the wrist—and yet nothing is left to chance. This is a painting that thinks through accumulation rather than composition, one that builds its space not through perspective but through density, speed, the repetition of the gesture.

Néree—a marine figure, a name that evokes the daughter of the sea without ever representing her—is not a subject but a condition: that of a liquid body, without a fixed contour, that exists only in passage. The work does not seek to capture a moment of the wave; it seeks to make visible what the wave does to the light, and what the light does to the painting itself.

Here, abstraction is not a refusal of the world but a more precise way of adhering to it: instead of representing the sea, the canvas becomes an extension of it—a surface where turbulence continues to occur.

Artwork trompe-l'œil on dibond.