Heir to the last great Chinese calligraphic painters, Fabienne Verdier trained in Chongqing in the 1980s, after four years at the Beaux-arts in Toulouse. There she discovered spontaneous painting and its subtle aesthetic codes, which she quickly adopted and integrated into her own artistic practice. Her work is the result of many years of study, and a veritable cultural melting pot.

Straddling modernity and tradition, Europe and Asia, she creates a universe all her own, a work that evokes a form of absolute universality. Her painting is organic and alive, representing natural and invisible forces, and reconciling contemporaneity and transmission.

Fabienne Verdier works in monumental, large-scale formats, using her entire body to create the movement with which her brush moves across the colored canvas. While Fabienne Verdier's work focuses particularly on notions of space, notably when she depicts fjords in Norway, mountains in China, or the Sainte-Victoire, it is here that she evokes the search for a non-space.

Named "Circle - Asceticism", the painting refers to a form of physical deprivation, a disregard for the body in order to focus on the spiritual, the immaterial. The circle thus represents an open door to the ethereal world, as well as a rejection of tangible existence.

Her intervention with the brush and canvas is simply a vessel, a transition from physical manifestation to metaphysical production. She climbs onto the canvas to produce a perfect circle, an idea she derives from a vision of a tadpole jumping into a pond and the perfect circles produced by the wave.

Like the whirling dervish, whose dance of concentric movements leads to trance, the circular movement the artist makes to produce this circle evokes deep, personal reflection. The circle is a symbol of unity and infinity, evoking natural perfection and the absolute.

The splashes of paint around the outline of the circle bring the viewer back to the materiality of the canvas, and its organic aspect. Far from erasing imperfections, Fabienne Verdier integrates them as an indispensable component of her work.

The circle remains open, unfinished. While the circle represents infinity, the broken circle is a universe of possibilities: a world that is not closed, but rather outward-looking. It represents a spirit in conversation with the energies around it, in connivance with nature and with others. The circle is an asceticism, but far from cutting itself off from the world, it reconnects with it and communicates on a spiritual level. It's a metaphysical exchange.

In the end, his canvases are the result of pure, spontaneous movement, yet thought and work, whose product always carries a certain proportion of the unforeseen, which ultimately touches on something profoundly real: a form of cosmic perfection.

On April 6, more than 10 telephones and one live bidder competed for this exceptional work by Fabienne Verdier. The canvas sold for €362,970, almost three times its high estimate. This is a record for the artist, whose value on the secondary market continues to climb, and whose quality of work already places her among the great painters of this century.