Couture contre coupure. Le Triptyque de Marie-Renée Chevallier-Kervern pour l’autel de l’Église San Rocco à Vallecrosia

The article is dedicated to the Triptych by Marie-Renée Chevalli- er-Kervern (1902-1987), created in 1986-1987 for the altar of the church at Vallecrosia in Liguria. We reconstruct in detail the process of creation of this work which consists in three sewn fabric cut-outs rep- resenting the theological virtues (Hope, Faith and Charity), basing our- selves on a corpus of drawings, sketches and preparatory work, as well as written testimonies (notebooks, diaries, scattered notes on loose-leaf sheets, photographs). It is followed by a comparative analysis of Chevallier-Kervern’s Trypych and Matisse’s decoration for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1949-1951). For both artists, these were their last major works. Initially favourable to Chevallier-Kervern’s work, the Italian ecclesiastical authorities eventually refused to install it once it was completed, for fear of losing the faithful. Beyond the biographical aspects, the interest in this comparison lies in the artistic dialogue between these two works. Both originating in the process of the cutting-and-pasting of paper, they present di&erent perspectives on the essential question in painting, namely the relationship between drawing and colour. While Matisse tended to blend the drawing into the colour, Chevallier-Kervern sought instead to accentuate the drawn structure of the work through stitching which she preferred to collage. )e introduction of this variant is consistent with the materials used: paper is glued, fabric is stitched. With fabrics, assembly is no longer the end point of the work; it is completed by stitching, which reintroduces drawing and line onto and into the canvas, thus modifying the outlines of the colour. In this way, Chevallier-Kervern - going past Matisse - returns to his master Cézanne.