Fabienne Gaston-Dreyfus — Tu hurles quelque chose à la mode — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Starts tomorrow: November 15, 2025 → September 21, 2026

This exhibition by Fabienne Gaston-Dreyfus invites us to discover and explore the vibrant, living work of the artist, on the occasion of the print created in 2024 in homage to the Roseraie du Val-de-Marne and now part of the MAC VAL collection.

“A title that feels like an invitation often carries its own perplexity. To call it mysterious would be an overstatement, yet You Shout Something in Fashion has the strange resonance of a painting that seems to raise its voice. Speech as a combat sport. ‘Everything happens here,’ says the artist. ‘The field is limited, like a boxing ring.’ No one really knows who, in this address or in this game, refuses to give in—whether it is the support (canvas or paper), or the left hand or the right hand trying to intimidate the gesture by refusing to yield its place. In fact, the artist’s painting hesitates between neither form nor gesture; it peels them both open.

The colours tell a different story—they seem to have internalised the softness of Fragonard or perhaps that of Guston, unless one should rather speak of de Kooning and everything that has happened since. How can such combativeness coexist with such delicacy? From Abstract Expressionism, Fabienne Gaston-Dreyfus has retained the idea that the work is a fight, and that the artist has no other choice, in her own words, than either to gain ground or to defend it.

It is therefore an ambidextrous journey, where the right hand constructs and the left hand feels, leaving us each time to determine what belongs to one or the other—to construction or sensation—when one crashes into the other. The exhibition is imbued with precisely this: the fruitful contradictions of a purely abstract struggle and the about-faces of an artist who does not believe her painting to be gestural; she imagines it as gesticulating, which is something very different.”

Nicolas Surlapierre

Curators: Nicolas Surlapierre and Lahouari Mohammed Bakir, assisted by Fati Konaté.