Without minimising its relevant alliterative playfulness, the Leibniz-inspired title allows us to perceive the artistic exploration of Françoise Deverre in its global conception. The work is a never-ending recomposition informed by several guiding principles both emanating from and transcending the history of abstract painting. This on-going process displays a perfect unity and yet remains volatile and unpredictable; it is permanent in its instantaneousness, mobile in its fixity and the active positioning of its different elements underpins the uniqueness of the work.

The polyptychs in two, three or four parts on free-standing canvas, are grounded in different sources of painting history which is itself ever-changing. The first stage in this artistic process is the production of complete ensembles which will in turn become fragments in some later unity. The visual impact of these operational combinations subverts the classical sense of vision of the onlooker, who is enlisted into active participation, and forestalls concentration on a single object, compelling us to establish relationships between several elements and their context, hinting at installation.

A condensation of abstract painting opening into a mature re-working, and a controlled sense of paradox -- such are the necessary keys to a reading of these conceptual strips. The solidity of the work stems in part from reference to essential works of the American school such as the vertical strips of Barnett Newman and his Z-shapes, the luminous evanescences of Mark Rothko or the intermingled and scratched “landscapes” of Joan Mitchell; or again, the vertical dripping-collapsing of Clifford Still or the shaped canvas relocating pictural bounderies introduced by Frank Stella. Manifestly, the very personal approach of Françoise Deverre only borrows from these great artists in order to pursue her own artistic emancipation.

Titles, at one and the same time, ambiguous, clear, enigmatic, revealing, mysterious, thread through this serial work from one exhibition to the next. “Paradoxical convergences” responds to “Resonant disjunctions” in a display of visibility which advocates the notion of open-endedness dear to Umberto Eco. The plural truth of the artist is to be found “between”, in the displacement which relegates totality to a cultured fragmentation. When one takes stock of all the various works amassed in the reserve collections of the international museums, it is clear that the personal options chosen by the artist lead us to favour a questioning subjectivity which the less perspicacious will simply find irritating.

Confronting forms, colours, styles and periods is a way of renewing a certain type of painting, or rather of creating a new type of painting. If art can only exist if deeply rooted in its period, free artistic expression is of all the more value. Occupying the space of an exhibition and the spatial projection of a practice result here in deliberate collision. In the configuration of modernity, there is no room for the tepid. The sole survivors will be those who dare to forever re-explore wall-painting in all its nomadic possibilities.

Christian SKIMAO. Translation Terry LEWIS.