Artist statement

Through portraiture, Clémence Devienne brings visibility to lives that exist at the margins of our gaze: residents of New Orleans, refugees, women artists, and Gisèle Pelicot. For over ten years, she has explored the face as a territory where the intimate and the political, individual memory and collective experience converge. Her portraits focus on people whose stories, life journeys, or struggles challenge the way we look at others and the place we afford them. The face thus becomes much more than a subject: it is a presence, an imprint, a space of resistance in which both the traces of a life and what remains inaccessible can be read. Through painting, the artist seeks to move beyond mere representation and approach a more sensitive truth, one that does not immediately reveal itself to the viewer. She explores what emerges on the surface of facial features, as well as what eludes them: the vulnerabilities, strengths, contradictions, and silences that make up each individual.

With her series Inner States, Clémence Devienne pursues this exploration by approaching the face in extreme close-up. Facial features occupy the pictorial space, capture the viewer’s gaze, and sometimes make the subject difficult to identify. Around them, areas of abstraction unfold, extending and intersecting the features, or seeming to place them under tension. These streaks and movements of colour are not merely a background element; they play an integral role in the representation, as though painting were giving form to what inhabits each face from within. Abstraction becomes the space of emotions, tensions, and invisible forces that move through a person without necessarily finding words. Moving between figuration and abstraction, controlled lines and the freedom of gesture, the image oscillates between recognition and erasure, presence and dissolution. The face is no longer simply what we see, but what we feel, permeated by an inner life that extends beyond its contours.

Within this space, where painting seeks to make visible what escapes appearances, Clémence Devienne invites us to look differently: more attentively, more intuitively, and with an openness to the complexity of others and to the unknown that every human encounter preserves.