Expensive, the title of a previously unseen acrylic on paper by Sylvie Fanchon, sets the tone for her first posthumous exhibition at Galerie Maubert, Paris [1]. The lettering, spanning the entire base of the painted surface, is stenciled as a reserve on a lightly colored sheet of paper. The word is smudged by the orange traces of the monochrome ground. One can imagine the artist’s pleasure in letting the paint spread into the word, blurring as the stencil was lifted. This reveals her rejection of a kind of perfection embodied by smooth, polished execution and sharp outlines. The asserted gesture of painting—its traces, smudges, and shifts—is characteristic of Fanchon’s approach, as is her refusal to identify painting with illusionism.

Expensive reflects Sylvie Fanchon’s mordant humor regarding the subjectivity and mutability of artistic value, and the figure of the artist—treated with (self-)mockery to avoid any form of sacralization. She regarded Marcel Broodthaers as one of her favorite artistic companions. Her works often invoked his definition of art as “an apolitical, useless, and slightly immoral activity”—a provocatively contrarian stance, still at odds with a time that readily conflates art, politics, and morality.

The exhibition brings together works by Sylvie Fanchon from different periods, from the rare architecture paintings of the 1990s to the 2000s and 2020s. It follows the guiding thread of the “painting as a surface for reflection,” unfolding in sequences structured by offset diptychs. It draws mainly on Pêle-mêle—a spatial arrangement recalling salon-style hangings—, the Decorative Monochromes, and the Toons: cartoon characters whose pared-down silhouettes, at the intersection of human and animal, evoke both satire (such as La Bruyère’s Characters) and the distancing principle of fables (from Aesop to La Fontaine). From the earliest work, Architecture (1994), to the most recent, The Purpose of Art (2022), all adhere to the principles central to Fanchon’s practice: the pursuit of flatness, the use of two colors, and the simplification of forms. “I don’t work toward visual mimicry but toward visual organization using borrowed, simplified real-world objects reintroduced into the surface of the painting. My goal: to strip forms down.”

Her drawing practice, which began very late in 2022, perfectly extends this process of stripping down forms, using the lighter, more agile tools of paper and pencil.

This exhibition continues to anchor Sylvie Fanchon’s work in the lineage of conceptual painting rather than abstraction—though her work was at times classified as abstract due to the formal rigor of her compositions.

In Expensive, a continuous dialogue unfolds with Marcel Broodthaers, particularly through their shared interest in the artist’s signature and initials—highlighted by the presentation of his double slideshow ABC – ABC Image (1974) or his Atlas (1975), which seems to merge stains, maps, and projection surfaces. The illustrated score of soprano Cathy Berberian’s striking vocal performance Stripsody (1966) also resonates with Fanchon’s use of toons as a way to approach representation with both distance and wit. The video of this iconic performance provides the soundtrack for the exhibition. 

Kathy Alliou

Curator, director of the Fine Arts Department of the Beaux-arts de Paris

[1] Sylvie Fanchon’s previous solo exhibitions with Galerie Maubert include shows in 2021 at the gallery in Paris, in 2022 at Art-O-Rama in Marseille, and in 2022 at Art Brussels.