Andrea Fourchy

One of the first academics to write about fashion, it didn’t take long for Roland Barthes to surmise that the design, branding, display, circulation, wearing and style so inherent to the art of clothing, was one of the greatest cultural myths there is. Clothing, a treasure trove for the semiological sleuth, the never-ending potentiality of signs and symbols hidden in plain sight, the detail of a pattern or a weave, the technique of tying a bow just so… If, as Barthes wrote, ‘the magazine is a machine that makes Fashion’, in layman’s terms, what stays and what goes, I wonder what he would have made of Andrea Fourchy’s new series of paintings in which checkered images, animal print, and Scottish knitwear patterns all vie for attention in juxtapositions that are less than friendly.

As far as painting goes, if I had to give these works a diagnosis, I would call them obsessive-compulsive, a Freudian slip of the Rorschach tongue, allowing for images to appear where there is only pattern. A constructed mess that is moody, sexy, atmospheric and slippery. An attitude that suggests its disdain for the classical rules of the medium (while knowing them all too well), and all the while pillaging from its history. Figuration here is clearly an afterthought, a happy accident that transpires from a playfully inside-out approach to painting, layers woven together. Some of these paintings even go so far as to look like the aftermath of an AbEx vs Pop fist fight. Who threw the hardest punch is up for debate. Just look at Ann-Margret, the 60s sex kitten best known for her breakout hit Bye Bye Birdie, trying to crawl off the canvas but forever frozen in that kneeling pose, taken from a promotional photograph but now rendered a lump form, pure shadow. Even the leopard that remains by her side, forever twinned, has more life to it. Here it’s all about double images that bring in new motifs, leopard spots confusing themselves for lipsticked kisses, zebra print towering over crawl babies. Elsewhere, the pixelated, modular colours of Fair Isle knits threaten to trump Matisse cut-outs, while Mona Lisa eyes dissipate into camouflage. Order, order! Zeroing in on details can go either way, like flipping a coin, a painter’s troubled relationship to positive or negative, plus or minus, appearance or erasure. What one omits on the psychoanalyst’s couch is, after all, just as revealing.

But, back to the leopard in the room. If your eyesight is starting to go fuzzy, it’s because perspective has walked off the canvas and exited the gallery. The field of vision is broken, like the checkered board that could just as easily be houndstooth clawing its way to life. A panda went out for a walk and lost its shadow in the process. Or what is more likely, the shadow tried to kick him out of the frame. There’s only room for one of us in this town and it will be the gritty, muscular ground that gets the limelight. In case of a no-show, a cancellation policy will be applied.

—Anya Harrison