Geneviève Asse - Bleu - 2020 - Oniris

Geneviève Asse's work requires us to stop, to enter gently in the footsteps of the artist who, rather than visual chatter, prefers silence, the kind you can taste at Chardin's. Fed by the research of her elders, Braque, Morandi and Bram van Velde, and rubbing shoulders with her contemporaries, Nicolas de Staël, Viera da Silva and a few others, Geneviève Asse walks alone.

Self-taught, at the dawn of the Second World War, she did not hesitate to join the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Faced with the horror of war, the artist of Vannetaise origin finds in art a soothing refuge. It was then that the whole world discovered "Asse blue". A unique blue from which nobody really knows where it comes from.

Through the use of a single colour: blue, synonymous with infinity and fullness. This colour has imposed itself on her. It is through it that in her painting the artist approaches the theme of the opening allowing the light to infiltrate and allows the spectator's gaze to cross the canvas.

An instinctive artist, she considers that painting is a deliverance that allows her to tell her story.

A colour that is her own and that we can identify right away - a sky blue or a blue-grey that modulates with very subtle variations in intensity - perhaps borrowed from that moment of dawn when the forces of shadow and the forces of day are in balance. - Charles Juliet

Since the forties, the work has been built on both an openness to multiple expressions and an unfailing rigour.