From 3 May to 13 July 2024 at Bétonsalon
Opening: Friday, 3 May, from 4 pm to 9 pm

From 4 to 26 May 2024 at Pauline Perplexe, Arcueil
Opening: Saturday, 4 May, from 6 pm to 10 pm
Visit by appointment on Thursdays and Fridays: paulineperplexe@gmail.com
Open without appointments on Saturdays 11, 18, 25 May, and Sunday 26 May, from 2pm to 6pm

QUEPUISJEFAIREPOURVOUS is a protocol-based artwork by Sylvie Fanchon installed on the windows of Bétonsalon since 2021 and that is regularly updated, derived episodically and indiscriminately from among the ten phrases that compose it ^¹. The words are those of Cortana, a “virtual assistant for personal productivity ^²” equipped with a reflex-function that interrupts any unhelpful tangents undertaken by users, in a typically feminine voice. The artwork replicates this direct and unequivocal address, inscribing it on the glass facade of the art centre, transforming it in turn into a sounding board for services expressed in the first person in an easy-read style ^³ with suspect motives. Located at the extremity of the building, the phrase is visible from the outside, but visible does not mean legible. Because each phrase, drawn in capital letters with no spaces or breathing room from one end to the other of the glass surface, traced in the margins on an invisible line, clearly stands out from the background wash of Meudon white, which has kept the imprint of the circular and regular gesture of its creation. In this way, the message has lost all its limpidity along the way: the meaning has difficulty resisting this collusion between the rectilinear line of the lettering and the agitated surface on which it is inscribed. This invitation to dialogue thus spins in an empty loop, which the gaze is invited not too linger for too long on, especially since all of this hides the disorder of the organisation (thus providing a real service).

These subtle discrepancies are prevalent in Sylvie Fanchon’s work, playing out through the inscription of a very clear symbol on a very simple surface. Extracting well-known and easily identifiable motifs, “common things” as she called them – everyday language, animal figures, decorative forms, or strips of tape – paring them down to retain only the contours and laying them in a strategic place (at the centre or the extremities) of a flat surface (a canvas or wall), using techniques with no particular knowledge required (collage, stripping, raking, whitewashing, etc.) and finally, revealing the strange character of this superposition, through the contrast of two colours that are often dissonant (red and green, pink and brown) attributed either to the form or the background… These are the well-known Fanchonian special effects that always manage rather mysteriously to thwart our immediate reflexes of recognition, to set our cursory associations into a tailspin, to create disjunctions, and elicit doubts, smiles, or laughs.

Although Sylvie Fanchon knew she had cancer, we actively prepared this exhibition together in Bétonsalon down to the finest detail. And on the occasion of a scenographic trial run, she latched onto a proposition for a rebound to Pauline Perplexe ^⁴ that, this time, was intended to be improvised.

The exhibition at Bétonsalon brings together seven recent paintings, created between 2021 and 2023. On the five big canvases (130 x 200 cm) hanging in the exhibition space, we can read from left to right: Enter Password, Error Data Deletion, Clean Your Android, Do Not Turn Off The Computer, Wait. All of them confront alert messages – errors, loss of data, eternal waiting periods – addressed by computers to humans. The typical and mocking silhouettes of comic characters – like Toons ^⁵ with an exalted Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny kicking back with legs crossed, and also Snoopy asleep or inanimate – lying down or buttressing these messages in capital letters, floating in vast spaces that could be called voids (deep-space voids, windy voids, fiery voids) depending on the bichromatic interplays between backgrounds and figures: black on red or black on yellow or red on green… Sylvie Fanchon refused the illusionist space in painting – she has been known to say that a painting is a surface without depth, period – she nevertheless accorded the possibility that something like a sense of loss emerge from the dark depths of her recent paintings, a flip with a touch of humour or hope. Today, knowing the fatal result of her illness, we can rapidly assimilate these alert messages of the loss of computer data with loss of life.

The exhibition at Pauline Perplexe presents about twenty drawings. Some of the older ones compose festive games using linguistic signs, for instance when two empty bubbles come into contact in an attempt at amorous communication, and bear a strange resemblance to clouds or excrement, depending on the projective abilities of the viewers. Other more recent drawings react to a new kind of abuse of language, this time stemming from the medical register that Sylvie Fanchon must now face; that which, for a lack of better options, appeals to maintaining morale and staying active: “Keep Making Plans”, “Keep Your Spirit Up”, “The Show Must Go On”! The orders to stay positive from medical discourse, the dubious helpfulness of Cortana, and the anxiety-inducing urgency of computer messages all had the power to make Sylvie Fanchon angry. “Une ignoble inspiration me poussant ^⁶” (Motivated by this ignoble inspiration), which she liked to quote from Marcel Broodthaers, this muted rage would set her to work.

The title of the exhibition at Bétonsalon, “SOFARSOGOOD”, follows an identical procedure in Cortana’s phrases: the text is applied in the margins in Meudon white, in a gesture that this time she intends to be chaotic, irregular, angry. The message is brief and its surface of application so broad that the letters are very big. That’s because this time the idea is to provoke a desire to stick one’s nose to the glass to discover the exhibition (rather than hide the disorderliness). In the face of cancer, SOFARSOGOOD resonated for us like a wager or at least a powerful wish, “so far so good” or “up until now, everything’s been fine”, which Sylvie Fanchon translated by “so far, so good”. This message already contains a hiatus, it is in fact an affirmation that is unsure of itself, an apt reflection of her work. Since Sylvie Fanchon is now dead, this double exhibition is a window that she has left open behind her.

Émilie Renard