The Prophet and the Fly

As a compulsive wanderer, Francis Alÿs found the inspiration for his work in the encounters he had in and around the different cities that he visits. As a meticulous and incessant observer of everyday life, Alÿs responds to things of a contingent and ephemeral nature with a direct intervention from the twofold perspective of a near-at-hand and at the same time remote onlooker. As an unclassifiable artist, the creator in the strict sense of the word continually seeks to free his work from the control of its maker and give it life of its own.

The Prophet and the Fly includes, in book form and accompanied by texts by Catherine Lampert, Alÿs’s latest drawings and paintings. Reproductions of small-format canvases that recreate passages from works by Plato, Nietzsche or D. H. Lawrence, among others, as well as pictorial sequences taken from notebooks and sketched, reproduced in facsimile form, which illustrate a work that is at once a metaphor and a condemnation of the reality that surrounds it.