FAFI: Sugar, Spice & Boys’ Tears

 

Painting a female character in the street in 1994 in Toulouse city in the south of France, was no trivial gesture. At a time when walls were dominated by graffiti — a largely male environment — Fafi introduced a figure that gazes directly, desires openly, and dominates unapologetically. This founding act inaugurated a fictional territory that would continue to expand: The Carmine Vault, a dense and structured narrative universe conceived as a parallel world where female bodies are neither objects nor symbols, but sovereign subjects.

For more than thirty years, Fafi has moved forward without compromise. Her international success — notably in the United States and Asia — has positioned her within a global cultural landscape spanning art, fashion, publishing, and popular culture, reminiscent of a feminine counterpart to Futura, yet without ever diluting the radicality of her gesture. She remains one of the few artists of her generation to continue painting spontaneously and illegally in the street, wherever she may be. Now based in the Basque Country, she continues to paint with a brush — sometimes still in high heels — asserting an unruly presence in which the artistic act becomes a physical affirmation.

Through drawings and watercolors on paper, paintings on wood panels and canvas, and works conceived in situ, the exhibition reveals a fully developed practice in which narration and composition engage in a mature dialogue.

For Fafi, sensuality is never decorative; it is a tool of emancipation. Domination is not a pose; it is a narrative strategy. Her work articulates a vision of feminism freed from prescribed roles, where fiction and the staging of the body become spaces of power.

The result of a collaboration developed in close dialogue with the gallery, this exhibition stands as one of the highlights of the Paris spring season. It brings together mature works, faithful to Fafi’s rigor and energy, and affirms the coherence of a path pursued without concession.

 

Opening reception on March, 12 at 6:30 PM

Galerie Chenus Longhi, 116, bd Richard Lenoir, Paris 11