In the year just past, I researched an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Not being able to attend myself, I sifted through the grainy installation photos offered up by google, and penned some brief thoughts about it. Now, months past I am reminded of it again.
The exhibition was an installation of the artist Francis Alÿs’ private collection of portraits. I love to see personal collections, especially those thirty years in the making. This was one of a compulsive treasure-hunter, less so the kind of collection expected of a major contemporary artist. Three hundred portraits of the same woman, gathered by Alÿs across three continents, where assembled side by side. The woman depicted in each is Saint Fabiola, the patron saint of the abused and widowed. She is portrayed in miniature, in embroidery, and in painting. In each medium she is imaged in a nearly identical manner: left facing profile, forehead and neck covered by a red veil.
Alÿs’ collection started from an interest in the artisanal copies of old masters. In this iconological pilgrimage he was surprised to so many reproductions of Fabiola, a fairly obscure 4th century Saint. Each image of Fabiola collected by Alÿs hails from Jean-Jacques Henner's 1885 painting of Fabiola in a classical roman profile pose. Henner's original is now lost, the obsessive reworking of his original painting makes the multitude of copies seem like doppelgangers.
It pleases me to think Alÿs’ own patronage to Fabiola. The hours spent searching for her in flea markets and second hand shops. And also, the curious devotion to her as an icon, carefully reproduced by so many artisans. Alÿs says of the portraits, ‘I personally see them as all different: each seems to project some kind of personal ideal of womanhood or to disguise, consciously or not, a familiar face with the features of Fabiola’
Seeing a portrait in such multiple creates a different way of looking. The image has been faithfully, strictly, reproduced with so little variation between one and the next that the effect is somewhat disquieting. The repetitive representation of her in Alÿs’s installation reduces her to an object that is fragmented and multiple. The woman Fabiola has dissolved into her iconographical image and become a commodity.
Not so long ago I stumbled across a little portrait of Saint Fabiola (left facing profile, red veil) hanging from the wall of a second hand shop in Sydney. She looked very much at home amongst the brick a brack and I was satisfied that some Fabiolas were spared Alÿs' collection. I couldn't help indulging my romanticism; this solo Fabiola was free to carry whatever personal significance was attributed to her, not to lose her face against the hundreds of others like her.
