Art-fair fatigue 3: FIAC

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Hopping in September from the Greek Islands to Basel and back, like hopping straight from summer to winter without passing 'Go', was already disorienting. Getting used to Paris again after two months reading a Kindle on the beach has been hard. Life here is what the French call 'sportif': climbing up and down Métro stairs and squeezing into trains, leaping on and off buses, shopping, walking into town and back... all these things drain energy. Even wearing shoes and bearing the weight of warm clothes is tiring. Now I'm an old-age pensioner, it takes time to get back into the swing.

And then, there were people to see, exhibitions to catch up with (those I hadn't missed altogether by being away in September), the opera season starting up again post-Covid, in Paris and Brussels, even Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs' 1977 piece I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating at the Théâtre de la Ville, no less, to see...

... and FIAC week!

The FIAC is Paris's usually-annual international contemporary art fair. With it come various other events, notably Paris Internationale, which is to the FIAC something like Liste is to Art Basel. Sometimes we also get an 'outsider' art fair, though this year I've read nothing about it. Asia Now, one I'd never noticed before, has for 2021 a special 'Tehran Now' section, so Tehran galleries and Iranian artists are present and I went to that instead. As I'm not really an 'insider', and anyway I'm too old, I don't go to all the openings and cocktails and dinners, but even so, it makes for a hectic, tiring week...

After the spectacular main fair in Basel, FIAC (usually held in the Grand Palais but this year set up in a tent-like structure that nearly blew away in a storm in the night; rain then absolutely hammered on the plastic sheeting the next day) felt a bit drab and conservative, and some of the works shown in Basel turned up again in Paris. There were, of course, exceptions, like Jocelyn Wolff or Air de Paris, but the big, 'old' Paris galleries were still peddling their Poliakoffs (how many paintings did he do?), Prouvé and Dubuffet to the avenue Henri Martin...

I was more at home in the FIAC's 'younger' section, in a way the FIAC's answer to Basel's 'Statement', only in Paris it's a whole separate section. It may have been the thrill of the familiar, but I really got a zing of goose flesh when I came to Dastan's booth, a simple presentation of just two artists, Hoda Kashiha and Farrokh Mahdavi, but to my eye just perfect - not just in the choice and juxtapositioning of the works, but right down to the chairs and tables in the middle. Congrats, too, to Dastan for getting on the cover of the Journal des Arts' FIAC special issue.

I was also very struck by the Pol Taburet painting at Balice Hertling. And of course by Kévin Bray at Stigter Van Doesburg. Kévin just gets better and better, fast.

All of my selection of FIAC photos is, unless I'm mistaken, from this 'young' section. After the photos, I've added a few links to press choices.










This is a link to an Art Daily Newsletter article about FIAC compared to other fairs.

This is a link to artsy.net's choice of the ten best booths.

And this is a link to Artnews's top ten.


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