JESUISDESOLEEJENAIPASCOMPRIS: A reflection on truth in Sylvie Fanchon's painting

<p>I have a recurring dream, in which I talk to a friend in French. He is a French speaker. Outside the oneiric realm we communicate in Spanish and English. But every time I dream about him, we speak in French. Inevitably, the dream lasts only a few seconds, as long as I manage to speak before I run out of words. Many times, I wake up with my mouth stuck.</p> <p>I should speak French, but I don’t. I studied it as a child and later as a teenager. In college, I studied philosophy and, as I finally chose to work on aesthetics and politics, I ended up reading endless treatises in that language. But I don’t speak it at all.</p> <p>The first painting I saw by Sylvie Fanchon was a black and white bichrome. On a black background, white figures recall the shapes of cartoon representations of animals. A dog, or some four-legged being, walks with its head up on the bottom right side of the painting and a plump little bird leans on a strip of white paint made in one brushstroke, on which a series of black letters made in stencil are piled up to form a set of signs: JESUISDESOLEEJENAIPASCOMPRIS…</p>