Malika Favre's 'Les Ciseaux' — literally 'The Scissors' — is a masterclass in the artist's signature visual sleight of hand: a woman's crossed legs, pared down to a few bold planes of cherry-pink, electric warmth and midnight-navy, resolve into the unmistakable silhouette of an open pair of scissors, so that body and blade flirt across the sheet until you can no longer say where the figure ends and the object begins. A four-colour screenprint on heavyweight Mohawk paper, signed and numbered by the artist in an edition of just thirty-five, it carries the graphic swagger that has made Favre a cult name on covers from The New Yorker to Vogue. Set behind glass in a warm dark-walnut frame with a gilt inner lip, it turns a wall into a headline. But to call it merely 'clever' is to whisper at a thunderclap: here the negative space itself becomes voluptuous, the absence between the shapes pulsing with as much erotic charge as the shapes themselves, so that the eye is forever seduced and forever denied. It is less a picture of a body than a body's rumour — a chromatic koan in which seeing and not-seeing dance the same dizzy tango, the everyday scissors and the reclining woman endlessly trading places — and the walnut frame stands guard around it like a velvet rope around something almost too alive to hang.
- Medium
- 4-colour screenprint on Mohawk 300gsm paper, signed and numbered (edition of 35)
- Framing
- Cheap wood frame with gold-painted rim, glazed
- Artwork size
- 400 mm × 400 mm
- Framed size
- 440 mm × 440 mm
