Fabienne Verdier

Waddington Custot Dubai presents From Song to Light, an exhibition of paintings and screenprints by the French artist Fabienne Verdier (b. 1962, Paris). After nearly a decade in China studying with some of the last masters of classical painting and calligraphy, Verdier developed a way of working entirely her own: standing above canvases laid on the studio floor, she guides a giant brush of her own invention, suspended from the ceiling, in a single continuous gesture. Her subject has long been the energy of the natural world and, over the past decade, the energy of music.

Bringing together three paintings and ten screenprints made between 2015 and 2024, the exhibition follows a path from the human voice to the light of the stars.

The earliest paintings, ‘Voyage d’hiver 3’ and ‘Voyage d’hiver 4’ (both 2016), belong to a series of eight that Verdier conceived while listening to Schubert’s Winterreise, the cycle of twenty- four songs for voice and piano composed a year before his death. Laying strokes of energy one over another for the first time, she lets the sense of scale dissolve: like Schubert’s wanderer, the eye can no longer tell whether it is moving through the landscape or the landscape is moving past it.

In 2014, at The Juilliard School in New York, Verdier sat in on Edith Wiens’s masterclass for young opera singers, following each voice, live, with a drawn line. From Wiens’s teaching on breath came the image of the voice as a spiral rising through the body, the “column of breath” that became her Vortex paintings, built on fragments of Mozart arias and shown at Waddington Custot in London in 2020 and again this year in Aria. The four Aria screenprints (2021) followed, printed on the artist’s own press under the supervision of the master screenprinter Michel Caza. Each is born of a particular aria, from Zaide, Le nozze di Figaro, the concert aria “Bella mia fiamma” and, for Aria #14, the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte. In each, a helix turns in one colour against another: black on yellow, green on vermilion, violet on khaki, blue and gold on black.

‘Nuit d’opéra à Aix’ (2017), made for the 69th Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, takes the voice outdoors. Conceived as a “visual partita”, its musical phrases run along the lines of a stave and rise out of a deep blue that recalls the festival’s performances, which begin only after nightfall. The night returns in ‘Ressac d’une nuit d’été (Undertow of a Summer Night)’ (2019), where currents of teal drift across black like the sea after dark, while two screenprints from 2015, ‘Énergie blanche’ and ‘Destins croisés’, go back to the single gesture behind all of this.

The exhibition ends among the stars. In 2021, while preparing Le Chant des étoiles (The Song of the Stars) for the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, Verdier set out to give each painting of a new series a first name evoking the stars, the moon, the sky or the night. With around a hundred linguists, anthropologists, historians and ethnologists, she gathered names from five continents, in their original languages and scripts: ‘Estelle’, from the Latin ‘stella’, “star”; the Basque Gauargi, “light in the night”; the Mongolian Odgerel, “starlight”; the Korean Eunbyeol, “silver star”. Inscribed on the back of each canvas, the name gives the painting an identity of its own, and with it the people, languages and traditions the name carries. A film of the same title (2022), accompanied by a conversation with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan, extended the project.

‘Nonkanyamba’, ‘Mézané’ and ‘Dara Reaksmey’ (all 2024) carry it into print. In each, a ring of light, red, pale gold or deep blue, surrounds a dark centre scattered with sparks of white: the glowing shell a star casts off as it dies, rendered as a portrait. ‘Nonkanyamba’ is Xhosa for “she who is a vivid storm”.

Seen together, the works trace one movement, from the breath of a singer to the light of a distant star, and one conviction: that sound, energy and light can be held, for a moment, in a single line. The exhibition also continues one of Waddington Custot Dubai’s closest collaborations. Verdier’s work has been part of the gallery’s programme since its opening year in 2016, through the solo exhibitions Voyage d’hiver (2022) and Energy Lines (2023, with Christie’s Middle East), and most recently the anniversary exhibition Ten Years of Art: Waddington Custot Dubai.