Most of us spend just a minute or two looking at each painting in a museum. Something famous or particularly fascinating might get five or 10 minutes, but rarely more. French artist Fabienne Verdier likes to take longer.

Invited to work with the collection of old Flemish masters at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, she spent four years contemplating six of its paintings. The results of her research and artistic exploration can now be seen in Bruges and Brussels.

Verdier’s work is informed by both Western and Eastern traditions. After art school in Toulouse, she spent 10 years in China studying the traditional art of calligraphy and its philosophical roots. Returning to Europe, she developed a style combining this calligraphy with Western abstract art.

Some of her work is small and delicate, but she also produces monumental paintings, executed with a giant brush suspended from the roof of her studio. This allows her to continue to work in the vertical, as with a hand-held brush, but on a much larger scale.

Wealth of choice

Her work with the Flemish Primitives in the Groeninge Museum began on the spot, spending time with the paintings themselves. Then she invited master photo-engraver Daniel Regard to visit the museum. “I asked him to make a print – the exact size as the original masterpiece – of the paintings that spoke to me and moved me the most.”

These were Jan van Eyck’s “Portrait of Margareta van Eyck” and “Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele”, Hans Memling’s “Moreel Triptych” and Hugo van der Goes’ “The Dormition”. Then there were two anonymous paintings: “Saint Luke Drawing the Madonna”, based on an original by Rogier Van der Weyden that is now in Boston, and “Mater Dolorosa and Man of Sorrows”.

Verdier took these high-quality prints, which preserve the intensity of colour and the details of the originals, back to her studio. Here she continued to contemplate the paintings but also researched their history, reading about their symbolism, the artists’ lives and also making connections with other works of art and lines of thought, before and since.

Beyond the visible

The results of this research can be seen in Verdier’s studio notebooks, which are part of an exhibition at the Erasmus House in Brussels. These contain sketches, photographs, copies and cuttings, linked together by a network of quotes and notes (mostly in French) from her reading. But as well as recording the research process, the notebooks also represent a cleansing of the system, since the research did not give her exactly what she was looking for.

“As a painter, and as a human being, I wanted to know about the almost metaphysical shock that we can receive when we stand in front of these paintings,” she says. “What is happening that allows us to be entranced and transported to such a degree? How, on these small wooden panels, did these geniuses of the 15th century succeed in communicating to us such a volume of thought, posing fundamental questions about our humanity, the cosmos, light ... about a thousand important things.”

Part of the challenge she set herself was to get past the perfection of the Flemish masters’ figurative technique. “They have made reality sacred to such a degree that it takes time and a lot of work in order to try to pick up what is beyond the visible. And I’ve spent all these years trying to be receptive to this mystery.”

While she left the intellectual research behind, it still informed her artistic exploration of themes from the paintings. “It shaped me, it nourished me, it made me grow internally,” she explains. “Then, when I take up my brush and I work spontaneously, it comes to a kind of maturity.”

The result is not the lyrical abstraction based on gestures that you find in 20th-century Western art, but an abstraction that seeks a harmony of form, the essence of things. For example, the posture of Canon Van der Paele is distilled into the single brushstroke of “Man at Prayer”, while the crimped edges of Margareta van Eyck’s headdress becomes a meandering white line on a red background, a “labyrinthine thought” that also suggests the folds on the surface of the brain.

Valleys of space

Verdier also works with presence and absence, interpreting St Christopher crossing the water in the “Moreel Triptych” by the shape of his cloak, a swirl of red on a blue background. Then there are the valleys that open up when she considers how two figures stand relative to one another. “When I paint a tree, and that vital force that gives life to matter, in the branches of a tree I see mountains,” she says. “When there are presences in the world, between you and this chair, for example, if I draw what is happening, once again a large valley opens up into space. I find the same structures everywhere.”

Verdier also works with more geometric shapes, exploring Van Eyck’s Madonna as a figure channelling the energy between heaven and earth in the “Sedes Sapientiae” series, or picking up the circles scattered throughout the same painting – in the window behind the throne, on the knight’s armour, in the Canon’s glasses – to produce the monumental “Polyphonie-Ascèse” installed between the beams of the Sint-Jans Hospital in Bruges.

Stroke of energy

Perhaps the most intriguing series is based on “Saint Luke Drawing the Madonna”. Verdier’s eye was attracted to a pair of figures in the background of the painting, gazing out at a river landscape. “One can feel something of the infinite there,” she says. But was there another way to achieve the same effect without the strictly figurative approach of the 15th century?

“Suddenly I saw St Luke’s belt as this single brush stroke with which I’ve worked since the beginning,” she says, recalling her study of calligraphy. “And I said to myself: Maybe I no longer have to paint a landscape to meditate on the landscape. If I can draw people into a single brushstroke, perhaps it will be possible to travel within it and have that perception of the infinite in the landscape in nothing more than a stroke of energy, of matter.”

The result is a series of massive black brushstrokes on red panels, the speed of the stroke evident in the texture of the paint and the way traces of red are revealed where the brush filaments move and separate. Gaze into each stroke, and see where you end up.

You can find a selection of Verdier’s work with the Flemish masters at both the Erasmus House and the Patrick Derom Gallery in Brussels, but a visit to the Groeninge Museum allows you to see the 15th-century originals as well as her larger paintings. Ancient and modern are in adjacent rooms, however, a deliberate choice that encourages visitors to make a short journey back and forth, holding an image in their minds.

Until 25 August

Tribute to the Flemish Masters

Groeninge Museum & Sint-Jans Hospital, Bruges
www.museabrugge.be