JESUISDESOLEEJENAIPASCOMPRIS. A reflection on truth in Sylvie Fanchon’s painting.

I have a recurring dream, in which I talk to a friend in French. He is a French speaker. Outside the oneiric realm we communicate in Spanish and English. But every time I dream about him, we speak in French. Inevitably, the dream lasts only a few seconds, as long as I manage to speak before I run out of words. Many times, I wake up with my mouth stuck. 

I should speak French, but I don’t. I studied it as a child and later as a teenager. In college, I studied philosophy and, as I finally chose to work on aesthetics and politics, I ended up reading endless treatises in that language. But I don’t speak it at all. 

The first painting I saw by Sylvie Fanchon was a black and white bichrome. On a black background, white figures recall the shapes of cartoon representations of animals. A dog, or some four-legged being, walks with its head up on the bottom right side of the painting and a plump little bird leans on a strip of white paint made in one brushstroke, on which a series of black letters made in stencil are piled up to form a set of signs: JESUISDESOLEEJENAIPASCOMPRIS.¹

I stared at the painting for a long time, putting the letters together and forming the words. I didn’t manage to form the sentence right away, I had to try several times, using punctuation marks: Je-suis-désolée, je-n’ai-pas-compris. It didn’t seem like a conundrum, but the work forced me to go slowly, perhaps at the same speed that my brain processes the language. I clumsily read the painting. Out of context the phrase didn’t say much, or said so much that I couldn’t place it either. However, the anchorage with the other characters made it less dense. I wondered if the intention of the use of language in the painting was political, as in the work of so many other Francophone artists, where language is a critical or agitational device—Guy Debord, Claire Fontaine, Thierry Geoffroy—; if it was an exercise concerning the ego—Ben Vautier—, or if it was more of a poetic inclination—René Magritte, Francis Alÿs. Inevitably, the phrase Soleil Politique from Marcel Broodthaers’ work came to my mind, perhaps because it was the reference that once hung in a reproduction in my house. I forced myself to concentrate and cling to find the expression of a brushstroke, to feel the color in the painting. After several minutes of pretending to contemplate, I laughed. I laughed at myself and how difficult it is for me to understand painting. I was surprised at how uncomfortable it made me feel not knowing where to stand, how grumpy my clumsiness made me. I looked at the letters again and read out loud JESUISDESOLEEJENAIPASCOMPRIS.

My encounter with Sylvie Fanchon’s work began with a detour, discovering her from some of the spaces that her work inhabits, in and around Paris—the city where she lives. It began in the suburbs, at La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, where the exhibition “Hedy Lamarr. The Strange Woman” included two small paintings by Fanchon. A bichrome with a blue background and orange stripes forming the phrase The Strange Woman, title taken from the eponymous 1946 film starring Hedy Lamarr. And the other piece, with the same inscription, but in a different font and carved in the white wall in such a way that the color contrast between the background and the shape was so faint that it almost went unnoticed.²

Next, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, I visited Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche. On the external facade there is a permanent installation, or semi-permanent— because the nature of the material makes it ephemeral. There, on the glass surface, using a layer of watered-down Blanc de Meudon (a kind of white paint made with crushed chalk with an earthy texture), the letters JESUISDE/SOLEEJE/NAIRIEN/ENTENDU³ appear as negative unpainted space on four glass panels with circular strokes that recall the movement made when cleaning windows.⁴

Later, again in the suburbs, at the MAC VAL, Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne in the town of Vitry-sur-Seine, I found a huge mural with a black background and ‘flesh’-colored stripes—a color that clearly does not exist as there is no flesh color as such, but I would not know how to name it; maybe something between pink, brown and sand, but which my head instantly defined as ‘flesh’ colored, irritating me with the racist persistency of language. Diagonal stripes of the same width ran across the wall beginning and ending in a ripped cut, evidencing the methodology, an adhesive tape stencil.⁵ On the left side from top to bottom it reads:

S
A
G
E
S
F
E
M
M
E
S

Sages femmes literally means ‘wise women’, but in French it is the way midwives are named. These words coincide with the artist’s initials. Sylvie Fanchon / Sages Femmes / S.F. Was this way of signing her work a coincidence? Could it be a way of establishing a link with a secret community of women?

My detour ended in the heart of the city, at the fine arts school, in an office of the École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris. I had never been in such a beautiful art school—so loaded in history. There, a painting by Fanchon was waiting for me. A canvas with a sky-blue background—was it more like light blue? Why is it so hard for me to identify and name colors?—with a small red cartoon figure in the center.⁶ It was the silhouette of a dog that I had seen many times as a child. I could not remember which cartoon it came from. I recognized the image, but could not place it in a specific context. It aroused a certain tenderness in me, but I had no emotional attachment to it either. Now, while writing this, I discover on Google, under the search “old dogs in cartoons”, that the character’s name is Droopy and it is a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer character.

Sylvie Fanchon thought that if her career stumbled, it was not because she was a woman but because she was not good enough, or maybe because at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, nobody cared about painting anymore. However, when I finally spoke with her, she said that she now realizes that her career was determined or at least marked by the fact of being a woman. Could that be the reason why I did not know her? Because she is a painter? Because she is French? Or because she is a woman? Fanchon is not particularly concerned with positioning herself in a history of women’s art, nor in a feminist production. However, I do wonder what women’s painting is. How women place themselves in a tradition, a medium that has been masculine for centuries; where the plots, gestures, and values have not only been created by men but created by a fully patriarchal logic and dynamics. Painting, as John Berger said, imposed specific ways of seeing, which kept a complicity with capitalism—as much as with the objectification of women. After decades, in which this has been pointed out, are there other ways of seeing and producing today? Other ways of painting? Can one continue painting after dismantling the metaphysical, sexist and capitalist logics of the medium?

Going back to the elements of her work, from the beginning of Fanchon’s career, in the late eighties, we find that her research is delimited by the surface. She builds from the plane, tracing the area that determines a working space. The frame, the edge in her work, because it lacks ornament, is not an exterior but a limit. In choosing not to adorn it she creates a two-dimensional space. It is interesting how this limit changes in her work. Although in many of her pieces this is determined by the canvas, there is also an exploration that takes it to the wall, where the surface expands. Likewise, there are the glass panels where she explores other materialities, but in which she insists on the condition of the plane as surface. Fanchon’s painting plays with scale and with the functions of the work. In the sense the canvas has historically had, her pieces can be interior—inside a gallery, museum, house—or exterior—the street, the public space. In both cases, interestingly, the rules of the work remain constant. Fanchon does not modify her execution in the face of the pedagogical or spectacular possibilities offered by muralism or street facade.  

Her work, contained in this delimited space, focuses on the tension between color and form. On the one hand, in terms of color, she always works with bichrome, creating visual games between two colors. This is perhaps to mark a certain affinity with minimalism, but refusing to endow with a single color alone the weight of an individual object. Her experimentation proposes composition games. Even if the viewer only sees two colors, in reality, there are several colors contained in the work. With the colors, the artist seeks neither the creation of density, nor of light, nor of dimensions. Nor does she pretend to affirm the medium as an instance of visual purism, much less to express or provoke feelings; her artistic practice lies in pointing out the game of what appears in between. In their crossing, their opposition, their tension.

In this same sense, language appears in her work. With it, she does not intend to dictate the truth or her truth, nor to propagate a slogan, nor postulate, much less to communicate a feeling or idea. Language is again a symbol that she appropriates in order to disavow it of its power. Without spelling or grammar, she gets on language’s nerves. As she puts letters together, unfollowing writing conventions, the referent becomes strange, ambiguous. 

Although Fanchon’s body of work, after more than four decades dedicated to painting, is very extensive and complex, it seems to me that these are the elements that delimit her universe. As if they were the components and rules with which she decided to play and establish a game with the viewer. It is from there that she sits in the history of painting, she is in it, but also beyond it. Her truth no longer has to do with validating a tradition, but with finding the logic and rigor of her own operation. She does it seriously but not without grace, she is constantly laughing at us and at herself.

A few months ago, I was at a friend’s house with our respective children. The children were playing while we were talking. Their game was a sort of dance contest, where each one of them could play their favorite song. I hadn’t paid much attention to how the game operated, until the screaming made me realize that part of it had to do with which of them Alexa obeyed. Each child was shouting a song to Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, to play. The voices were getting louder and louder, and the children’s tone became aggressive as she didn’t recognize what they were saying. After a few minutes of watching the show, I stopped to tell them not to yell at her. It annoyed me to see how they were talking to a woman, even if it was a simulation of one. Why is it that all virtual assistants have a woman’s name and voice? Does that insist on women’s labor in care work ? Does the cold and aggressive tone with which we relate to them validate in children the very possibility of violence towards us? I wondered all this as I helplessly watched how my friend’s son yelled, “Alexa, turn off”.

JEMAPPELLECORTANA/QUEPUISJEFAIREPOURVOUS.¹¹ It is 2014, and Sylvie Fanchon comes across a new artificial intelligence service automatically downloaded to her phone. Her name is Cortana, and she introduces herself as Microsoft’s “personal productivity assistant”. She helps users find sites of interest, social networks and services. She does so, like almost all such forms of artificial intelligence, using a helpful tone—available in several languages—and by asking questions that, in their logical simplicity and linguistic awkwardness, become existential queries.

Cortana is originally the name of an ancient Scandinavian sword, which was used to name the artificial intelligence character in the Halo universe. There, Cortana is built by cloning a woman’s brain, although she has no physical form—she is just a voice. In the game, Cortana was designed for espionage and infiltration purposes. She is described as an intelligent and lively “being” with a sense of humor. She is loyal to humans, perhaps because she herself is a clone. Therefore, to create a personal digital assistant, Microsoft has used the character of that saga, and intends to propose a more personal service, which can compete with Siri or Alexa. Its most remarkable function, we are informed, is that she allows you to remember things. You can tell Cortana to remind you of anything. 

Fanchon uses the phrases that this operating system has thrown at her. With them she has built the Cortana series since 2017. Words are the central characters of the pictorial spaces in this series. Their appearance in the game of bichrome is produced with templates, stencils in this case of letters, which allow its precise production. It is not the artist’s handwriting, it is a common typeface, that can be replicated uniformly in the different pieces of the series. Cortana’s sentences are appropriated and reproduced by Fanchon, always appearing in capital letters and without punctuation. Thus, there is no indication marking the beginning or end of each word. The mechanicity of language in the operating system works in its pictorial decomposition as a creator of estrangement. POURVOUSAIDERAVOUSRAPPELER/CEQUIESTIMPORTANT/
JESUISDESOLEEJENAIRIENENTENDU/JESUISDESOLEECONNEXIONIMPOSSIBLE/
ETSINOUSDISCUTIONS/DITESMOICEQUEJEDEVRAISSAVOIRAFINDEPROTEGERVOTREVIEPRIVEE.¹²

The figures chosen by Sylvie Fanchon, whether animal forms or letters, do not pretend to be representational but serve as a cultural and epistemological index, perhaps a punctum in a moment of the world. On the surface of her painting appears the absurdity of representation and truth in artificial intelligence. It would be funny if it were not grim. AI has come to stay, Fanchon’s Cortana paintings will be a reminder to beware of the enchantments of them.

The language Cortana uses is one of those futile silhouettes drawn from our world of representation, the appropriate double of our shared culture’s absent referent. In its simplicity, Fanchon shows us, with delicacy and humor, that there is no natural principle. This allows us a joyful detachment from metaphysics. The beauty in Fanchon’s work is not in the truth in painting, in relation to the thing or being, but in the joy of having freed ourselves from it. With it the true truth, the truth of truth, has been broken. 

The morning I visited Sylvie Fanchon’s studio turned into afternoon. We reviewed the works she had stored there. One by one, we went over her techniques and the reasons that had led her to making them. She showed me the stencil shapes she keeps in a folder, where letters of various sizes, and cartoon characters, are piled up. She generously spoke to me in English, although, after a while and about certain things, she would switch to French. There are things that one can only say in one’s own language. Time went by in talking not only about art, but also about our daughters—what it means to be mothers and to be artists. About work and care. We also talked about our mothers and fathers, our inheritances and legacies, the places where we were born, and how to live in the times we are living. About what the pandemic did to us, and what we have lost. For Fanchon, these intimate detours are not part of her work, but for me they are important to know when I write about her. It is only from there that I can think about the truth. A truth that no longer pretends to be universal, not even true. Perhaps only possible, thinkable, speakable, shareable.

Now, while thinking and writing about Sylvie Fanchon’s work, I realize that I am smiling too.