Francis Alÿs
"Francis Alÿs" by David Gleeson, Fall 2009, pp. 135-136
Fifteen years ago, Francis Alÿs began shopping at flea markets, bazaars and jumble sales for discarded paintings with which he could build an art collection. Unsurprisingly for an artist whose practice consists of open-ended, exploratory projects, he had no idea what the outcome would be.
The collection now contains numerous reproductions of a now lost late-19th-century painting of a little-known Catholic saint named Fabiola, who, legend has it, lived in Italy more than 1500 years ago. Alÿs collected every copy of the Fabiola portrait that he could find, in cities ranging from Maastricht to Mexico City, and exhibited 28 of them in 1994. Three years later in London, he showed about 60 versions of this simple painting of a young woman in profile, a red cloak covering her hair. The collection now comprises roughly 300 items and is continuing to grow, with Fabiola’s image on paintings, drawings, collages, tapestries, ceramics and reliefs. One alarming but strangely compelling piece renders the saint in beans and seeds. At the National Portrait Gallery, its presence among the grandiose portraits of British monarchs and celebrities was jarring, but the intrusion of something conceptual—and therefore subversive—into this shrine to the great and good was quietly welcome.
The installation was surprisingly well-suited to the gallery’s Victorian grandeur, with the walls of two rooms covered in multiple portrayals of the hallowed, though slightly pathetic, Fabiola. It is difficult to resist the pull of this simple, innocuous picture, and as your eyes travel over and across multiple versions of the portrait, other details emerge. Giveaway marks of the casual painter, such as torn canvases, warped stretchers, impossibly shaped heads and variations in size and colour attest to the uniqueness of each portrayal. Unlike most exhibitions of thrift-store art, which tend to exude a stale aura of mocking, postmodern irony, Alÿs’s display accords respect to every piece, imbuing them all with a dignity that overrides their kitschy pathos.
“Fabiola” is, above all, about transformation. In accumulating this collection, Alÿs has rescued discarded objects and made them his own. The internationally celebrated artist’s seal of approval makes their transition from rubbish to objet effectively seamless. This exhibition invites reflection on both the eminent gallery that hosted it and the act of reverence involved in making a portrait—indeed, the quasi-religious nature of all portraiture. Be it a masterfully painted canvas or a casual holiday snapshot, a portrait is a hymn to its subject. In this context, Alÿs’s project represents a step towards the reinvigoration of a slightly stale institution.
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