In 2023, exhausted by illness and cancer treatments, Sylvie Fanchon explored a new, smaller format, less energy-consuming than painting, for which she rediscovered, with great pleasure, more elementary interplay between background and form. She found herself reconsidering drawing for its own sake, whereas until now it had more often than not been a preparatory stage for paintings, as the archive of her creative process.

In 2009, with the series Les Caractères, she added to her vocabulary of forms by introducing typical, mocking silhouettes of comic-book characters – like luney toons with Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny, who stretch out or arch over these messages in capital letters, floating in vast spaces that could be described as empty, interspace voids, windy voids, burning voids, according to the play of bichromies between backgrounds and figures: black on red or black on yellow or red on green…

And later, a character appears, this time from a famous comic book: Snoopy, the philosophical dog of the Peanuts family, who spends his time relaxing on the roof of his doghouse, lying on his back. Snoopy is an aspiring writer, a lover of art and soda, and reads War and Peace at the rate of one word a day. In short, Snoopy takes time to live and time to rest.

Sylvie Fanchon’s latest Snoopys are either dozing or inanimate, lifeless perhaps. One of them, Snoopy chéri (2023) (without e) lies on his stomach, the tufts of grass on a green background combining with his shaggy coat, looking more like a dead rat than the cute original Snoopy. In the drawing Snoopy chérie, the matrix for this silkscreen, his stretched-out body mingles with the line of the ground traced by a thin strip of scotch tape in reserve on the black-brushed background in that expressionist gesture dear to Sylvie Fanchon. Whether he’s asleep or dead, we can’t really tell, but the drawing inscribes his body in a material continuity with the background. This feminine “Snoopy darling” is a way of putting a bit of herself into it.

Emilie Renard
June 2024