Here, the artist used a drawing by her son in which he reproduced Matisse’s painting Goldfish. It shows a rapid and colourful line that traces the contours of the fishbowl, the fish, the foliage and the table, treated as signs and symbols. Almost nothing remains of the original painting. It is a kind of superimposition, drawn from the aesthetics of sampling, which simultaneously uses several styles, motifs and techniques, and treats art history as material available in real time.
In reality, this is a falsely spontaneous staging that borders on naïveté and acknowledges its own conditions and mechanisms of production. Fourniau relied on this masterpiece of art history to allow herself a shift between different registers and to question the notion of the “decorative,” which is very present in the criticism of Matisse’s work and in colourful, gestural abstract painting in general.
