Park Hyatt Hyderabad – Art Collection

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Béatrice de Fays (a.k.a. B2Fays) executed 29 paintings for the Park Hyatt hotel’s contemporary art collection , many of them over 20m long.

Béatrice de Fays’s paintings are permanently displayed in the basement level and corridors of the six floors of the hotel. Their most striking aspect is the presence of two characters that seem to haunt them : a boy and a little girl. In this series, the faces and postures of the characters are repeated but their expressions are varied. We get a distinct feeling that this repetition actually reveals more differences than similarities.

Repeating images allows her to go beyond a single frozen picture, to go beyond one snapshot. It allows her to install a feeling of timelessness… where she can conceive different facets that she would not be able to see if she was simply travelling through time.
Therefore, freezing time allows her to consider all the different viewpoints of a single moment. And perhaps the characters are also better revealed through this frozen time-frame.

The exhibition of the paintings in the hotel is not insignificant. Thanks to their repetition, the visitor can almost imagine, in certain perspectives, that the characters are in movement, somewhat as in the sequence of images in Muybridge’s works, a precursor to motion pictures. It is really up to the visitor to reconstitute the time presented. While walking, he can connect all the disconnected moments, and reposition them in the present time.

To make her canvas, Béatrice de Fays uses cotton fabric, used in India to wrap parcels. Most of them still carry the factory markings, stamps, yardage, prices, serial numbers…This choice to conserve these tangible memories in her paintings, implies a desire to anchor her characters in reality. The cotton speaks about connections, since it has been used to wrap parcels. And in fact she thinks that painting always functions as links between things that are separated.

She started with cartoon strips in 1984. When she shifted to painting, she discovered that this space allowed her to travel… to enter into the depths of reality… to superimpose… to stop time, and to enter into its density. Therefore she made layers, instead of a cartoon that is “de-composed”, she tried to “re-compose” the present time.

This anchoring in reality is also found in her other works where there are obvious references to historical places. The Buddha of Hyderabad, shopkeepers of the Old City, scenes from daily life and portraits of legendary personalities.

For her, painting is truly a medium which allows to unite spaces and time, and she can superimpose successive times periods. At the same time, she can maintain a contemporary perspective on the environment that surrounds us.

The Park Hyatt Hyderabad collection includes works by the following artists: Béatrice de Fays, Anuradha Thakur, Manohar Chiluveru, John Portman, Laxma Goud, Ramana Reddy, Ramachandran Manappat, Ritu Purana Das, Ashok Mullick, Anjaneyulu Gundu, Chippa Sudhakar, Hetal Chudasama, Matthieu Faury, Devyani Parikh, Laxman Aelay, Anamika.V, Ravi, Kiran Kumar, Mohammed Osman…

This collection was curated by Virginie Soualhat (Project Head), and Serge Le Borgne (Artistic Director).