The owner of the Fabiolas is Belgian—born artist Francis Alÿs, who amassed the ensemble almost by default. Shortly after he abandoned his vocation as an architect in favor of a conceptually driven art practice, Alÿs decided to make an art collection for himself. Given his limited resources, his abiding fascination with various forms of artisanal production, and his interest in the structure and role of the (art) market as it impacts economies of production, he resolved to build his collection from “hand-painted” copies of what he assumed would be famous masterpieces that he would find in flea markets and similar haunts. But, in place of the anticipated journeyman renderings of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Leonardo’s Last Supper, or Millet’s Angelus (or, for that matter, the audacious interpretations of Alberto Korda’s Che Guevara), he encountered pictures of a young female saint whom he came to know as Fabiola. For rather than the Madonna (or even Madonna), she remains the copyist’s favorite model. If most of his early acquisitions were found serendipitously, on his wanderings through cities as far flung as Maastricht and Mexico City, more recently the findings of colleagues and contacts have expanded his project. Beginning as a modest, almost casual, quest, Alÿs’s deliberately low-key venture has nonetheless produced an exceptional entity and a shift in his thinking. The questions raised over the years by both the geographic dispersion and the abundance of copies have transformed the original endeavor into an investigation: “Why that image in particular? What gives it that power to resist . . . first mechanical reproduction and now digital reproduction? What does the act/ritual of painting that image . . . mean for its author? What is it that made it become an icon, an object beyond any consideration of taste? How has it served a reminder of the existence of a completely parallel and separate art scene from, say, ‘ours,’ one with its own references and obsessions?” Alÿs’s collection may be distinguished from most others assembled by artists on account of its founding precept: its basis in copies, for this governing mandate has meant, ipso facto, that the work of the celebrated professional practitioner is forsaken for that of the artisan, the renown for the anonymous, the original for the replica, and the precious for the ostensibly commonplace or banal. That Alÿs would choose to devote his attention to unknown practitioners is fully in keeping with his aesthetic; that the project’s originating conception, its governing logic and axioms, would ultimately produce results far from what he could have anticipated is fully in accord with his customary ways of conceiving projects; that its underlying ethic downplays issues of the signature statement in favor of communal or collective discourse is symptomatic of his interest in collaborative methodologies.

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