With the works in the Musca’s Cycle, Ivan Fayard focus on the issue of blurring the target. If we consider their production process, these paintings are, first of all, grey panels. In this way, they refer back to the tradition of the monochrome, which “has haunted abstraction since its beginnings like the ghost of its possible end, this end of painting announced for the first time with a roar by Rodchenko.” Behind the monochrome’s silky plane, the cadaver of painting would therefore lie. Yet, on the surface of his grey panels, Ivan Fayard has painted hundreds of stylised flies, as though signifying that this cadaver still provides plenty to feast upon. These flies, symbol of vanity or makeup element for 18th century Élégantes, are alternately black and white. This alternation creates concentric stripes which form on the grey veil of the monochrome – or rather beneath it, insofar as the flies seem to burrow into the painting, giving it depth – a target. But this target is subverted. Although he revives certain geometric painting by introducing a virus into the monochrome, at the same time Ivan Fayard keeps his distance from it; he approaches it with irony.

The choice of the fly as unit, whose repetition creates the painting’s pattern, is not innocent. Incidentally, these swarms of insects present in the works of the Musca’s Cycle bring to mind an anecdote by Vasari, who said, “Giotto, in his youth, one day painted a fly on the nose of a figure that Cimabue had initially started painting. The realism was such, that Giotto’s master, when settling back down to his work, tried to swot the fly away with his hand several times before realising his mistake.”