uncopy

Once upon a time there was an original. It was finished at the end of the 19th century by the academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. Fabiola, the portrait of a woman with a fixed gaze to the left and a red veil is thought to have long been lost. And nevertheless, the painting and the figure it portrays still live. For more than 15 years the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has been collecting Fabiola reproductions that he finds in flea markets and which continuously crop up in private attics. His art collection has meanwhile grown to 412 copies. They are mostly anonymous works in which the authors, sometimes with bravura, sometimes amateurishly and clumsily, attempt to reconstruct the original painting and to make a copy of an original that no longer exists. With his Fabiola collection, Francis Alÿs negotiates the continued life of an object that originally escaped from the field of art back into everyday popular culture and takes the same object back into the field of art as an idea and recollection of an object. In the long run the existence of the copy here seems to be going beyond the existence of the original.

Fabiola (since 2007), by Francis Alÿs