The Artist Facing the Challenges of Our Time

Living in the tropics for decades means living with transformation as a daily condition.

Floods. Heat. Shifting skies. Landscapes that change before you finish looking at them.

This is not a backdrop to my work. It is part of the material itself.

When I build a surface in oil and pigment on canvas, I am translating what prolonged attention to a changing world produces.

Layer after layer. The slow accumulation of observation.

Atmospheric abstraction is not a style. It is a practice of sustained attention — to light, to matter, to what the surface holds when the gesture is finally still.

Contemporary art does not have to explain a crisis to engage with it. It can simply hold still long enough for the viewer to feel what is at stake.

That is what I try to do from my studio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Claire Lassonnery
French contemporary abstract artist
Atmospheric abstraction