Sylvie Fanchon

Sans titre (Mot de passe), 2022

Sans titre (How much), 2020

Sans titre (The Purpose of Art), 2019

Sans titre (DITES MOI), 2017

Sans titre (Je suis désolée), 2018

Sans titre (Authentification required to not restart), 2022

Sans titre (Data Deletion), 2022

Sans titre (Nettoyez votre Android), 2022

Sans titre (Do not turn off your computer), 2021

Sans titre (Que puis-je faire d’autre), 2018

Sans titre (Are you a robot), 2022

Sylvie Fanchon’s painting remained faithful to radical means and intentions, in accordance with a series of previously fixed rules: twotone colour scheme, flatness of the surface, absence of depth and extremely schematic forms. Fanchon worked with forms drawn from the world around us which, once decontextualised, are difficult to identify. Deceptively simple, her works exploited the ambiguity of their subjects, leaving room for a multiplicity of interpretations. Between abstraction and figuration, her painting was not conceived as a technique for reproducing the visible, but rather as a practice that explores the different modes of visibility of the real.

The last series of paintings by Sylvie Fanchon stemmed from a kind of borrowing from the contemporary world: in 2014, she inadvertently downloaded the Microsoft voice-assistant Cortona onto her mobile phone. Cortona was an app that used to give verbal advice, offers of help and requests for information. In her paintings, Fanchon appropriated the generic utterances of the AI software, combining them with abstract gestural strokes and archetypal figures or ‘toons’, which she described as “commenting on and conveying a feeling, a meaning, that can be shared by everyone”. Reflecting on the art market and the value of painting, she also played around with her signature, reducing it to the domain name sylviefanchon.com as a way of demystifying the image of the artist. Her work is full of humour and self-deprecation. She would deconstruct images and language to question the frameworks that govern our perceptions and relationships.