NYLON Magazine - September 2007 - (Page 153) THE PURSUIT OF FAFINESS “Birtak was once a pirate, but he was fed up with robbery and stuff and decided he wanted to become a ballerina,” the young woman sitting across from me casually recounts. “But the Fafinettes were really mean and decided to cut his leg off to prevent him. But he said ‘Fuck! I’m going to go to the Opera Garnier in Paris and still become a ballerina.’ And he did!” Welcome to the world of Fafi, the French artist most recognized for her candycolored coterie of sultry, nymphlike, female characters—the aforementioned Fafinettes— and the make-believe setting in which they rule supreme. “I closed my eyes and I imagined a world where Fafinettes became the characters, but many others could come around,” she says of their special colony, named the Carmine Vault. “It’s always a mix of dream and reality,” she adds. “For example, the Fafinettes smoke cigarettes like real people, but they’re totally surrounded by strange trees or animals.” The Paris-based art scenester (who never reveals her real name) adopted her cheeky alias in 1994, when she was a graffiti artist in her hometown of Toulouse. Not surprisingly, she was one of the few women in what was, at the time, a male-dominated scene. She also set herself apart by using paintbrushes instead of spray cans. “My paintings were tagged over, but I didn’t care,” she shrugged. After landing a 2001 group gallery show in Paris—the only girl in the collection—more exhibitions ensued, followed by Love and Fafiness, a book of sketches and “girlie art,” published in 2005 in Japan, which rocketed her to superstardom there. “It kind of makes sense, right?” she says of the Fafinette’s semblance to Japanese anime characters. In the States, Fafi’s most visible creations French artist Fafi has gone from graffiti artist to gallery darling—and now, she’s going global. By Laura Neilson have shown up at adidas and LeSportsac stores, after the artpreneur teamed up with both brands to create original designs for their spring 2007 collections. But despite these commercial ventures and the potential ubiquity of her Carmine Vault characters, Fafi is fiercely determined not to repeat herself from one project to the next. “Most of the people that approach me only want the Fafinettes. But from the start, I’m telling them that I want carte blanche,” she asserts. “I don’t want to make just another collaboration. I want to make something new for me so I can challenge myself.” In the case of LeSportsac, for example, the gemstone-palette print is a pictorial adaptation of a comic book, which she developed specifically for the project. A recent trip Down Under was another foray into new territory, involving a series of gallery shows throughout Australia in which, for the first time, the Fafinettes turned up in 3-D. “I think it’s the next step for me to bring people into my world,” she says, her eyes widening. It seems fitting then, that Fafi would create the hubba-hubba cartoon image of Lily Allen, in the music video for Mark Ronson’s cover of the Kaiser Chiefs’ “Oh My God.” The video is a Jessica Rabbitinspired performance of animation fused with reality. Given Fafi’s proclivity to conceive new artistic challenges for herself and her distaste for dipping her paintbrush in the same place twice, it’s unlikely that this rebel du jour will be standing still anytime soon. “I don’t know if it’s so good, but at my age I feel I really have to work and keep meeting people right now,” she says. “And maybe in 10 years I’ll be making crêpes in the countryside.” all images courtesy of galerie l.j. beaubourg, paris. From top: Fafi poster on the street in New York; an untitled Fafinette sketch from 2007; Lily Allen gets animated; a street painting in Tokyo of Fafi with her friend Uffie; a 3-D piece from Curvy 4, exhibited in Sydney.
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