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For some time now, for those who follow Sylvie Fajfrowska's work, a greater freedom, a pleasure renewed in each picture, a humour, until now hidden, have appeared, are visible. At least, that's the feeling I get, as a viewer. The more time goes by, the more Sylvie Fajfrowska is daring an odd figuration (what other word could I use?). Singular at least. Disturbing. She is one of those painters who don't give a damn for the established categories of the history of painting and place themselves right in those in-between areas. A painting practice that is based on "and", not "or". On the edge. Borderline. A tightrope walk. I get the feeling she pushes certain paths explored up until now to their logical ends. It has often been stressed how, although abstract, her painting did not avoid the question of the image, quite the contrary. How she undertook a sort of inventory, surveying a forma[ territory, her unique goal being to make the picture work. It has been written that the painter also worked from images (real and/or mental)... Pursuing this line of research, it would nevertheless seem that lately there has been a rupture. Today, Sylvie Fajfrowska is really taking the risk of the image. An image with no narrative. Without the crutch that explicit narrative can sometimes (often?) be, that functions then like some kind of justification. There is none of that here. A bag, a bear, an eye, another eye, flowers, a bra, a bed, a circle, a curtain, lines. So obviously present. That and nothing else. What you see is what you get. Figures on backgrounds, removed from their context, abstract, strictly speaking ... Following this logic of equivalence based on an interplay of form and colour whose only purpose is to bring to life and construct the surface (a logic that has been used very rapidly to describe and analyse her work), off we go... It doesn't matter what the figure is, as long as we have the surface plane. Pursuing this, as if her work until now had never ever been anything other than images of painting. At the same time, l'm not so sure of that, of what I have just written. I am not certain the painter's work can be reduced to simply a matter of equivalence of interplay between form and colour. Where the subject painted would matter little, where the animation of the surface, the surface plane alone would count. I wonder if the subjects Sylvie Fajfrowska paints are as innocent as they would have us believe at first glance. Because, there, facing us, these images don't have those identifiable characteristics that would lead us to categorise lu-hem in the register of trivia. They are not insignificant clichés. Not today, nor have they ever been. These motifs would, to this extent, seem to have been chosen. Picked from the flood and stock of all possible figures. What is painted seems to me both so strange and precise that the figures in question are even more suspect. Intriguing. (Especially when one knows the amount of time the painter spends on each one of her canvases. How slowly she executes them.) Hyperpresent images, so laden, weighed down with possible references that they become empty or hollow rather. Images that bother us. The image is difficult. It's not practical. It blocks the view. It grabs the eye. Screens. It forces us to go beyond, to delve under the surface. Inevitably, painting three empty but swollen ski-suits... in a sort of fake triptych that is after all a triptych, without being one... or elsewhere bears or handbags... has a meaning. But what are they doing here, on the canvas? A meaning. But, let's be frank, it escapes us. Gets away. Intrigues me. Is not so easily attributed. Because, these motifs, these figures come back, are recurrent. Not regularly, nor obsessively. That would be too straightforward. But, enough to disturb, to question the choice. Two or three times. Figures the artist comes back to. Figures that come back. Iconography: it's often about masks, things that hide. Curtains drawn, clothes, bags closed... Things that let us catch a glimpse. That distract the eye. Underwear. Cut-out, curved surfaces. Eyes too and, more gnerally, round shapes. But also motifs that have to do with the body: objects for the body, bodies hinted at... And more explictly still, interiors. Hypothesis: whilst one whole part of the work depends on keeping all expressiveness (gesture, facture, etc.) at a distance, it is perhaps precisely there where this work stands. In this selective affirmation. As if these figures functioned as individual psychological receptors. Everything (an intimate relationship with the world, the expression of a subject) is there, under our very eyes, but hidden. Exposed and concealed. Never revealed. Represented. To show by hiding, to make one see by concealing. Making full use of the image's attributes. We will however never have access to the inner cuisine that has led to this particular choice of what is not, and we don't care. What matters perhaps is rather to know, see, guess the inevitability of that choice. And, if this hypothesis proved to be true, it would considerably change the way the work is viewed. Frank
Lamy - December 2000 |