Fabienne Verdier

Waddington Custot is pleased to present ‘Aria', an exhibition of French artist Fabienne Verdier’s (b.1962) acclaimed Vortex paintings. In this series, Verdier explores the relationship between painting and sound, translating Mozart’s arias — including Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, and Don Giovanni — into visual form. Verdier initiated the series during her tenure as the first artist-in-residence at The Juilliard School in New York. Initially working on a small scale with pen on paper, she closely observed rehearsals, breathing techniques and vocal performances. She came to conceive arias as helices of sound spiralling through space, each composition generating its own distinct vortex.

In the large-scale paintings presented here, Verdier renders the melodies and rhythms of individual arias as ascending spirals. Each work is anchored by a powerful, whirling helix — painted in black, red, electric blue or cream impasto — set against smooth yet variegated fields of deep emerald, midnight blue or dove grey, inspired by Flemish master painting. The works convey a striking sense of lightness, echoing both the emotional lift and physical sensation of listening to an aria.

This fluidity is achieved through a single, continuous gesture, made, as is typical for Verdier, using unique tools of her own invention in a highly adapted studio environment. In this case, the form is created with an enormous, self-made horsehair brush suspended from the studio ceiling, as Verdier stands atop a mobile platform. Raised above the canvas, which is laid on the ground, Verdier is able to fully engage with the brush’s vast physicality, guiding it in sweeping circular motions to paint powerful, fluid expressions.

The Vortex series extends Verdier’s long-standing engagement with the challenge of representing intangible natural forces: gravity, kinetic energy, sound waves and vibration. As she describes:

“This series represents the energy of man and nature brought together in what becomes a state of total immersion. There is the dissolution of self into sound, into the environment, into the atmosphere. In my work I try to capture the invisible voice over soundwaves, to visualise energy and those things we feel but do not see.” 

Alongside the Vortex paintings,  ‘Aria' includes a group of drawings made in 2018 during Verdier’s atelier nomade, a two-year plein-air painting project in and around the Sainte-Victoire mountain range in Provence. This historic landscape, long associated with Paul Cézanne, became the site of Verdier’s direct, immersive engagement with nature. Travelling with paper, crayons and paint, she produced spontaneous studies from observation, spending days and nights alone on the summit of Montagne Sainte-Victoire and establishing an outdoor studio opposite the mountain to draw its shifting forms.

The Vortex paintings were Verdier’s first major body of work following her 2019 retrospective in France, held across three institutions including the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, where the atelier nomade series was also exhibited. First shown at Waddington Custot in 2020 shortly after their completion, the Vortex exhibition was forced to close prematurely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Reopening on 15 January 2026, ‘Aria' offers a renewed encounter with these works, revealing the breadth of Verdier’s practice and her sustained engagement with sound, geology and the forces shaping the natural world.