Claudie Laks: The Listening Eye

​CLAUDIE LAKS: THE LISTENING EYE Paintings and Collages Preview: Thursday, November 5, 2026 Artist Reception: Thursday, November 12, 2026, 6–8 pm About Nicolas Auvray Gallery is pleased to present The Listening Eye, an exhibition of paintings and collages by French artist Claudie Laks. Through layered abstractions, rhythmic gestures, and unexpected relationships between color and material, Laks creates works in which painting becomes an ongoing dialogue between intuition, resistance, and discovery. The exhibition's title reflects Laks's approach to painting: the artist must stay attentive to what emerges on the canvas rather than impose a predetermined image. In Laks's work, color is never passive. It moves, resists, accumulates, disappears, and resurfaces, inviting the eye not simply to observe, but to listen. Trained as a sculptor in Georges Jeanclos's studio at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Laks brings a distinctly sculptural sensibility to painting. Her canvases develop through successive layers of pigment, creating weight, depth, and movement. Circular gestures traverse dense surfaces, while fragments of earlier marks emerge beneath newly applied color. What initially appears spontaneous reveals a sustained negotiation between the artist and the evolving work. Working directly against the studio wall's resistance, Laks approaches painting as both a physical and intuitive process. She has compared this encounter to Jacob struggling with the angel, an image of struggle in which uncertainty and resistance become inseparable from discovery. Each gesture changes the conditions for the next, until the painting gradually finds its own equilibrium. Her collages extend these explorations into a different material language. Constructed from fragments of earlier gouache paintings, they bring together cut, layered, and reassembled surfaces in precarious arrangements of color and form. These works occupy an engaging space between painting and sculpture, turning discarded fragments into new visual relationships. Two formative encounters illuminated Laks's artistic sensibility: Constantin Brancusi's studio, where sculpture seemed to shape light and space as much as matter, and Claude Monet's Water Lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie, where color becomes an immersive experience. These influences resonate throughout her practice, not as stylistic references, but as an enduring investigation into how color, material, and space can alter perception. Art historian Pierre Encrevé has characterized her work on the plane as a form of "compressed sculpture," while writer Régine Detambel has associated her circular gestures with a kind of writing that resists becoming legible text. In Laks's work, meaning emerges not through recognizable imagery but through the experience of looking itself. The Listening Eye invites viewers to experience painting as an encounter rather than an image to decipher. Here, color speaks without words, gesture becomes its own language, and looking becomes an act of listening. About the Artist Claudie Laks is a French artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, collage, and printmaking. After studying literature and linguistics, she trained at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, including in the studio of sculptor Georges Jeanclos. Her early sculptural work received the Caplain Saint André Foundation Sculpture Prize (1982) and the Elf-Aquitaine Prize (1983). She subsequently explored porcelain during a residency at the Manufacture de Sèvres. Her work has been presented at ARC (Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Musée de Sens, and Galerie Protée in Paris, as well as at international art fairs including Art Paris and Art Karlsruhe. It is represented in the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP). About Nicolas Auvray Gallery Located in the heart of Chelsea's gallery district, Nicolas Auvray Gallery presents contemporary artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media. Exhibition Information Exhibition: Claudie Laks: The Listening Eye Nicolas Auvray Gallery 522 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011 Exhibition Dates: November 5, 2026 – December 13, 2026 Preview: Thursday, November 5, 2026 Artist Reception: Thursday, November 12, 2026, 6–8 pm Read more Toggle Painting