CLAIRE MESNIL
BIO
THE COLORS. THE LIGHT. THE DIFFERENCE.
Claire Mesnil is a European contemporary representational and figurative artist, based in Cologne/Germany. She spent part of her childhood in Germany, France and Ireland before finally moving to Germany at the beginning of her school years. She studied art history, philosophy and classical archeology (PHD in 1989) and began accompanying studies of fine arts at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (ENSBA) in 1988. She studied oil painting and drawing with Pierre Matthey and Christian Fossier, also object and conceptual art with Christian Boltansky until 1992. Since 1990 she worked in advertising and artistic freelance work for 6 years. In the mid-90s she became more and more involved with computers and started studying web design and programming.
For the next 6 years she worked as an IT specialist, web designer and IT coach in various international companies. In the late 00s years Claire decided to return to the fine arts and has been working as a professional artist since then.
Her work has been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions (Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, France, Belgium, Romania, Uruguay, Kenya und South Korea) and is included in many private and public collections (Germany, Great Britain, Austria, France, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland, USA and Qatar).
Reconsidering the conventions of figurative painting, Claire Mesnil explores in her paintings the various identities of reality, analyses them far beyond the immediate visible and finally puts them
together in a new way.
Her themes are rooted in a balance between fantasy and reality, dream and realness, the mysterious and the obvious.
"I love to paint abandoned old houses that show traces of the people who lived in them. I like the emptiness of vast spaces where time expands between memory and now, on the blurring line of yesterday and today."
In discovering the harmonious balance between these poles, Claire creates a new reality of an even greater intensity. She uses light as an element, enhancing the season, time and space in her compositions. Tonal layers combined with bright accents of pigments create depth and vibration of color even in the darkest shades.