Geneviève ASSE

French painter Geneviève Asse was born in 1923 in Vannes
She passed away in August 2021 at the age of 98
She has been exhibiting at the Oniris gallery since 1995

Since the 1940s, Geneviève Asse has been giving us an extremely rich art form whose quality and depth transports us into a contemplation that is meant to be silent. Geneviève Asse uses only one colour, blue, on her canvases of various sizes, from tiny to large, high to wide.

I believe that my blue is not quite a blue. It contains me. In addition, there is air, water. The slate if I bend down to earth. There can be so many things in the contents of the blue. Also a kind of joy. The blue fills you with joy. Sometimes there is drunkenness in the painting, and painful struggles. That's why, despite appearances, I don't believe that my painting is now neither smooth nor monochrome. The tones have come together and give this feeling of unity: the colour has balanced itself.

In Geneviève Asse's work, blue is synonymous with infinity, distance and fullness. For the painter, this hue is the only one which, covering the support of the canvas, also allows to cross it. In order to situate itself in depth, blue needs an architecture, the artist says of herself that "Space is composed of summary and sensitive forms that are balanced by the mass and by light, an architecture is created.

It is with painting that the artist fully approaches the theme of opening, of door, of elementary architecture that opens an enclosed space and allows light to infiltrate. This form of opening is given by lines whether horizontal or vertical dividing the canvas in two.

Numerous exhibitions have already revealed the work of Geneviève Asse who, from her early still lifes to the abstraction of her blue canvases, questions and privileges the theme of light.

In her paintings, Geneviève Asse reveals one of her primary concerns: division. Her canvases are as if torn apart, incised with a fine line, sometimes red, sometimes white, like a scar of light. This recurring division in her work poses the problem of the partition and the meeting of the full and the empty, this essential act for the artist then distinguishes two parts on the canvas, to then better seal them in the whole.