Faces of Francis by Julie Portier

What does the artist think about in his studio? He recalls a volcanic island somewhere in the Mediterranean. He remembers the colors and smells of Tangier, where pistachio blends with saffron. He reflects on all his past or imaginary journeys, which still awaken his senses. Inspiration is a journey between memories and present desires.

The more I write, the more language feels inadequate to translate something as subjective and complex as aesthetic feeling. This is why so many texts about art, refusing a purely factual approach to works, end up saying nothing at all. I believe I’ve written a few such texts myself—cluttered with poetic imagery that covers the very images they intended to describe. If I’m going to write about something other than what the works mean, I might as well digress.

I didn’t write this delightful paragraph about the artist and his inspiration. Nor does it intentionally speak about Alfredo Aceto. It talks about an imaginary artist to describe a fragrance in the catalog of a New York perfumer—precisely the one the artist wears, and whose name he has borrowed for his exhibition: Faces of Francis.

There’s already a lot to unpack. Let’s skip the literary qualities of marketing, so recognisable in this lyrical tone where analogies fall like guillotine blades (“inspiration is a journey”). Note how effectively the statement condenses a host of stereotypes to sketch, with a semblance of lightness, a generic portrait of the artist: male, Western (if he’s in Tangier, it’s because he’s traveling), wealthy and presumably middle-aged (having traveled so much), with a nostalgic temperament that fuels his art. To be fair, the brand embraces a vintage spirit, which perhaps justifies associating the figure of the artist with a luxury product, celebrating the well-established marriage of art and fashion that began in the 1980s. The choice of name, however, remains surprising—assuming it refers to expressionist painter Francis Bacon, one of the most famous and tortured artists of the second half of the 20th century (and still one of the most expensive). His “faces” reflected not so much the stages of a Mediterranean cruise but the many agonies of existence. As for his studio, it is renowned as a manifestation of chaos on earth, littered with paint crusts and other debris—so much so that reconstructions of it are displayed as contemporary art installations. Needless to mention the suffocating smell of turpentine that must have filled the space.

I tend to think this awkward reference isn’t the result of sloppy art direction. On the contrary, it reflects the cold and ordinary power of cultural appropriation by capital, which has long expressed its dominance through a form of dilettantism, making it seem easy to transform everything it absorbs into consumable pleasure. In this context, it’s only natural that a cosmetics brand would present itself as an artist. On their "About Us" page, they declare: “Masters of surprise, we cultivate the art of contrast and joyful moments that suspend time.” Here, the repetition is almost certainly intentional.

Seen from this angle, the lazy and narcissistic gesture of naming an exhibition after one’s own perfume can be understood as a form of retaliation. At the very least, it’s more cunning than it appears. By reclaiming (a product already his), the artist transposes this entire cloud of connotations into a ready-made title that distances itself from the idea of the creative act as an expression of intense emotions or as the result of studio labor.

It is worth recalling, in passing, that when Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the ready-made, signed a perfume bottle, he did so under his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (Belle Haleine – Eau de Violette, 1921).

Alfredo Aceto has learned more from Marcel Duchamp than from Francis Bacon, but he owes even more to Sylvie Fleury, the artist who joyfully recycles avant-garde legacies into industrial production—often adding a feminine touch with faux fur. Alongside his critique of patriarchy, Aceto has inherited Fleury’s vision of art as self-exploration, revealing all the ambivalences of being in relation to desire and consumption.

Though casually borrowed from a toiletry bag, Faces of Francis fits the exhibition and the artist surprisingly well. Beneath its novelistic allure, it promises to solve the enigma of a complex personality with deceptive appearances—and perhaps, through that, to unravel the mystery of creation.

This exhibition, like many of Alfredo Aceto’s, brings together works with vastly different aesthetics, as if they were made by several artists. Meanwhile, hidden in plain sight—here’s the thriller element—are other suspects: automotive entrepreneur Sergio Marchionne, who once owned the Château de Blonay that now adorns the stairs of the art library; Gustave Courbet, the painter of L’Origine du Monde who also painted a landscape of the same château; Marcel Duchamp, whose naturalistic bird drawings, published in the Gazette de Blonay, can be read as yet another conceptual gesture. One might even add Jacques Lacan, the last private owner of Courbet’s infamous painting, and surrealist André Masson, whom the psychoanalyst commissioned to paint a classical landscape to cover the image of the female sex beneath it. Decades earlier, the painting had been concealed behind The Château de Blonay, now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, where Alfredo Aceto went to photograph it.

As a conspiracy narrative takes shape—typical of his exhibitions—the artist links this chain of coincidences to signs reflecting intimate aspects of himself. These might include childhood memories, his passion for luxury cars, or other fetishistic obsessions, such as speech therapy sessions to correct his tongue’s shape, his sexuality, or his fondness for hotel gyms. When it’s not the hood of his white Subaru, it’s his terrycloth towel that serves as the backdrop for his photos of found objects.

The clues connecting art history and neoliberalism ultimately converge toward a syndrome of hyper-narcissism. From there, one might lean on the sincerity of these confessions—because everything is true—or advocate for the “fictionalization” of the author, as the title already suggested with its tongue-twisting risk (like The hunter who knows how to hunt without his dog). Alfredo Aceto has taken into account the collapse of myths surrounding the artist figure, such that his appearances in his work function as allegory. This lends his practice a melancholic tone—more so, in my view, than evoking a solitary temperament or specific incompatibilities with contemporary society (or the art world, for that matter).

If his portrait isn’t directly present in the exhibition, it is suggested by his scent, which is no less egocentric, even as it evokes the idea of evaporation, with the rest of the space occupied by ghosts. Of course, there’s a dose of irony as well. A simplistic reading of the signs at play might reduce the whole thing to tragicomic psychoanalysis: an inquiry into the sources of creation where tongues are threatened by padlocks and a château hides a woman’s sex.

At the end of this text, you’ll notice that it has scarcely commented on the exhibited images. That was announced from the start. In any case, it refrains from saying what the works mean, allowing everything above to be read as an ode to ambivalence and polysemy. Like me, the artist isn’t interested in aesthetic experiences based on the mediation of a singular message. While the photographs circulating in our contemporary world are subject to the tyranny of univocality (proof through image, instruments of false truths), the photographs gathered here always refer to a deferred referent or an absent image. Sometimes, they manage to evoke a feeling that can’t be explained—an eroticism without an erotic object (very Duchampian, by the way)—or, as Rosalind Krauss said about surrealist photography, “a tear in the fabric of the real.”