Clédia Fourniau
Reiffers Art Initiative

Every spring, Reiffers Art Initiatives awards a prize to an emerging artist from the contemporary art scene, aiming to highlight and accelerate the recognition of a young talent whose work invites us to perceive the world in all its complexity and diversity. For the 2024 edition, five artists were nominated—Majd Abdel Hamid, Alex Ayed, Clédia Fourniau, Garance Früh, and Aïcha Snoussi—and presented their work in the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize Exhibition from April 26 to June 8. Following the opening reception, Clédia Fourniau was announced as the 2024 laureate, recognized for her vibrant creations that explore the gesturality and material effects of abstract painting.

© Portrait of Clédia Foruniau by Axle Jozeph for  Reiffers Art Initiatives

"Clédia Fourniau says she "makes" her paintings. This is her way of emphasizing their quality as objects and how she makes them, somewhere between industrial production and experimental cooking. Using tools and products seemingly unrelated to the realm of painting (like a resin used in the nautical industry), the artist creates her paintings through a process that combines mechanistic precision and research, meditation and spontaneity. Fourniau's paintings owe their metallic appearance to the same alkyd resin used to lacquer boat hulls. She applies a series of layers and brushstrokes of vibrant colors, which spread across the canvas: acid yellow, rich violet, mint and apple green, blood orange. On occasion, she uses a mica powder-based bonding agent to enhance the surface with a pearlescent finish. This ultra-toxic, sugary concoction makes her paintings candy for the eye; their visual immediacy absorbs the viewer's eye, simultaneously causing it to slide towards the edges or back to its own reflection. In her workshop, the artist begins by choosing the canvas format, and then the textile she will use to cover the frame, opting for colored or printed fabrics versus the immaculate cotton canvas of her early works. The patterns and colors give the work its initial momentum and guide the creative process. Once assembled, the textile is encased by a formwork—a gesture the artist continues to use, although it is no longer technically necessary to her work. She then baptizes the canvas with brushstrokes of acrylic paint, the first of a series of layers, which she spreads side by side or on top of one other. While the resin encapsulates the decisions, actions and revisions done over time periods ranging from a few weeks to several years, the final work systematically defies our comprehension of the creative process behind them: in truth, it is difficult to read the chronology of their surfaces. As time goes one, Fourniau's canvases have become more complex, with old techniques (like formwork) amalgamating with newer methods. The paintings are archives of the experimentation process and the gradual appropriation of the medium and its possibilities.

Sometimes the surface is not entirely covered, and areas of unpainted textile appear amidst the saturated colors and gleaming varnishes, like quiet spaces in the din of color, a void in the midst of excess. The lightening of the palette and gestuality that characterizes Fourniau's 2023 works demonstrate greater permissiveness towards painting Working on the ground instead of on sawhorses brings the body closer to the canvas, frees movement and facilitates use of the brush, while the dimension of pleasure seems to have opened up her chromatic range. Spontaneity in painting is not innate; it is cultivated over time spent in the stu-dio. In this sense, Clédia Fourniau plays with the "trickiness" intrinsic to abstract painting. Her works draw us in by the brilliance of their surfaces and colors, and yet deceive us by the seeming simplicity with which we interpret them, the apparent spontaneity with which they were made, as well as their inability to be accurately captured by digital media.
Because nothing is worse than viewing Fournia's paintings on a screen: we are unable to appreciate the interplay of matt finishes and brilliance, the superposition and proximity of the hues, the places where the fabric shows through, or their relief. Their thick edges encourage viewers to take a step aside. Hence we must free ourselves from the confines of the surface, for this is where the painting begins."

© Installation views Aurélien Mole