In her workshop in Valleraugue, Claire Degans shares with us her inspirations in front of the landscapes of the Cévennes Gardoises. His work is a door to somewhere else where we feel deep peace. The light in the center of his paintings allows this passage.
Claire Degans is a radiant person. Like her paintings, a luminous vibration emerges from her. A white and misty wave emanates from the center of his compositions. We are caught and attracted by this mysterious void.
In front of her painting, she tells us about her work on light: “This light that we see appearing in the background of the painting is truly a call to somewhere else that seems full of promise to us. I have memories from my childhood of playing on the floor on the carpet, suddenly a ray of sunlight would come in and the dust would rise in the light. I still have those memories when I was really, really little.”
My first memories are linked to light.
By looking at the work of Claire Degans, we return to ourselves in a space of tranquility. This singular perception of fullness in front of the artist’s paintings is truly palpable. As a child, young Claire went to the Sainte-Thérèse school (L’Assomption group) in Montpellier. She received eight hours of religious education per week.
The painter today speaks of the divine. In his work, it is more about a higher force that transcends our material reality. “And if this light which comes out of the painting and seems to us calling was also, like a beacon, the announcement of a passage? It’s a bit as if there was something transcendent which was this light and which came to incarnate itself in the world.”
It’s as if something divine is taking place.
Claire Degans does not hide the emotion she felt during her visit tou Petit Palais Museum in Avignon This museum, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, brings together more than 300 painters from the Italian pre-Renaissance. The artist is captivated by the light that emerges from these paintings and the gold leaf work. She describes this aesthetic shock remarkably on her website : “Each altarpiece, each representation of the Virgin gives off this same light which touches my heart and which I find surprisingly modern.”
The artist seeks to represent somewhere else, a dream, a memory. She paints Mediterranean landscapes bathed in strange lights, lost paradises in which human traces become one with nature.
Above all, it seeks to make an inner image visible: “What I seek to represent is this place where humans do not take up all the space. We step back and the order of the world takes over – the order of the world, creation – and this order is a source of peace, that is to say, things are in their place and it results in peace. deep peace indeed.”
Claire Degans spent her childhood on the Mediterranean coast, opposite Porquerolles. Every summer, she takes a boat and spends her afternoons in turquoise coves, in the shade of eucalyptus and umbrella pines. She remembers these magical moments filled with beauty and happiness: “Beauty as a link between humans because it is something that we all share. It opens us when we take the time to live it as a quasi-spiritual experience, it opens us to something else.”
It’s this “something else” which transports us and seduces us with Claire Degans, in what she also calls, “The breath of the landscape”.
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