Monopoly World. Isabelle Faria
For the last few years, artist Isabelle Faria (Saint-Maur des Fossés, France, 1973) has been working on a creative cycle dedicated to the seven capital sins. After luxury, vanity, wrath and envy have been committed, this catalogue presents the works that deal with sloth, a series of drawings and installations under the title Mono- poly World, in which the artist adopts an unsuspected perspective.
Sloth is presented in a unique context, a few animal societies dominated by a tendency for grouping. The groups are composed of three kinds of individuals: dogs, monkeys and birds of prey, all of these belonging to different races and species, in sce- nes of great solemnity, in which violence is a ritual of everyday behavior.
Isabelle Faria’s use of animal images in order to address the issue of sloth would allow us to evoke fables, those narratives with a moral intention in which, as we well know, each animal acts strictly according to its character: the hard-working ant, the cunning fox, and so on. Nevertheless, these watercolor drawings are part of an intert- wined narrative and not just any single story. The characters are aligned, as if posing in a celebrating attitude, proud of being who they are, of doing what they do, as if their deeds had already taken place. Everything culminates in these unsettling drawings. It is no accident that the dogs presented here belong to breeds modified in order to obtain violent and aggressive animals.
The history of art gives us a different model of group images, presided by the sense of pride in belonging to a certain class. The corporative portraits of the civic militias and professional groups of the Dutch Barroque – with Frans Hals and Rembrandt as the main creators – show us groups of individuals carrying out a profession or a mission, united by the same destiny and displaying great cohesion. They know that each one of them has his function within an established hierarchy that appoints a responsibility to each individual and does not allow anyone to feel helpless or useless. At the same time, individuals acknowledge each other and the chain of command prevails.
In today’s world individuals don’t identify themselves much with the companies in which they work. Large families seem to have disappeared and social bounds are abun- dant and at the same time fragile. The function of the group is therefore quite relevant when it comes to analyzing organization structures and the sharing of power. From highly codified institutions such as the Catholic Church or national armies, to more informal and ever-changing ones such as 18th century European royal courts or the present mafia organizations, illegally dealing in weapons, drugs or people, all of these have inspired Isabelle Faria’s cinematographic, striking and revealing project.
