The Collector: Alain Servais

Belgian collector Alain Servais is somewhat of a throwback. I first met him at the Istanbul Biennial in 2022, riding a moped and sporting one of his trademark neckties. I bumped into him again recently at both Frieze and Art Basel Paris.

“I didn’t start collecting. I started experiencing art,” Servais tells me. He says he adds up to 80 works a year to his collection, which now numbers around 1,200. In London, he acquired Ella Fleck’s Training Material (2026, one of three editions) from LA’s Ehrlich Steinberg gallery. He also snapped up a Babi Badalov work from Galerie Poggi at Asia Now Paris.

The works are destined for The Loft in Brussels, a space that is part exhibition venue, part living archive, where invited curators regularly rearrange the collection. It also hosts residencies, bringing artists into direct contact with the works.

His approach is more cerebral than that of many collectors I speak to. With a background in finance, he’s interested in what art can reveal about the world and how it can challenge the way we think.

After studying classics and taking an MBA in applied economics, Servais went to work on Wall Street. His parents had little interest in culture, and museums weren’t part of family life, but in New York, he wandered into MoMA and experienced what he describes as an explosive reaction, comparable to “hearing Led Zeppelin or Talking Heads for the first time”. Museums also offered him a sense of serenity amid the demands of his professional life.

It took at least three years of looking before he pulled the trigger and started buying. Today, he advises younger collectors to take their time and start small. “You always make mistakes because you need to learn,” he says. Developing an eye takes practice, and Servais has little patience for collectors who outsource their decisions to advisers.

Installation view. training material by Ella Fleck for Frieze London 2026 with Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Ehrlich Steinberg.

“Collection is a creative endeavour for the collector. If you let someone do it for you, you’re losing something extremely important. It’s not your collection. It’s someone else’s collection.”

To make his point, he compares using an adviser to buying “an exercise machine that promises to give you abs while you sit on the sofa eating popcorn”.

Asked what he would want someone to understand about him by walking through his collection, Servais offers one word: “Complexity”. He uses art to interrogate how people live together and the assumptions that shape society.

To explain, he turns to Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which prisoners mistake shadows for reality because they have never seen anything else.

“We’re living in a world of shadows. As we are born among those shadows, we believe that they are reality,” he tells me. Money, class, gender and nationalism can shape our view of the world so deeply that we stop questioning them. Art, he believes, can help us see these assumptions differently.

Curiosity has taken Servais to Taipei, Guangzhou, Mérida, Istanbul and, more recently, Uzbekistan. He says he visits at least one new city every year, seeking out unfamiliar cultures and younger artists. The works he collects become records of these encounters. “Collecting art for me is not accumulating objects at all. It’s living differently,” he says.

Le Loft. Courtesy of Servais Family Collection.

Servais also sees collecting as a responsibility. The artworld is an ecosystem: artists need studios, galleries need to pay their rent, and ambitious works made for biennials can struggle to find a home after an exhibition closes. Collectors can sustain that network by supporting galleries, lending works to museums and preserving pieces for future generations.

One thing that particularly gets him going is the number of people who enter the artworld and immediately decide to become dealers or advisers. He recalls inviting a young notary to the Venice Biennial, helping him gain access to major fairs and watching his enthusiasm grow. After several years, the man decided to become a gallerist. Servais was horrified. “We don’t need more gallerists, we need more collecting notaries in the artworld,” he says.

The artworld needs people with different skills and perspectives. Collectors should also remember the smaller galleries that first took a chance on an artist and continue supporting them as those artists become better known.

He is equally frustrated by the market. Having spent much of his professional life in finance, Servais understands money. What bothers him is the attention given to prices, celebrity and notoriety, which increasingly dominate conversations about art.

After Art Basel Paris shut on Friday amid protests, Servais blasted the decision in a newsletter, arguing it showed a lack of trust in the French authorities to guarantee safety. He also accused the market’s megagalleries of calling the shots while smaller exhibitors pay the price. The big players, he argued, can afford to ignore weekend trade, while smaller galleries depend on visitors who can’t attend during the working week. He criticised major galleries for pulling works despite the fair’s advice to leave their booths untouched, and questioned how affected exhibitors would be compensated.

In another recent newsletter, he described receiving hundreds of previews ahead of the autumn auctions and fairs and wondering where he could still find art that interested him. He’s particularly critical of what he sees as commodified work: art promoted through fashionable narratives and an artist’s market profile. In his view, significant art should challenge its audience. Simply liking something isn’t enough to establish its importance.

Financial value, he insists, doesn’t determine what he buys. He enjoys discovering artists before they become established names. He knows how the artworld works and is unafraid to criticise it.

Servais says art fairs are becoming too predictable, with expensive work and familiar names dominating the conversation. His newsletter questions whether the vast infrastructure of fairs, galleries and private events serves artists or sustains an increasingly expensive market. He remains determined to find experimental work, acquiring dozens of pieces each year by under-the-radar artists.

These ideas are reflected in hear/here, the exhibition currently on view at The Loft. Exploring silence as a social and political force, it brings together works by artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rada Akbar and Olga de Amaral.

The exhibition considers how silence can offer contemplation, enforce control, conceal violence and shape the writing of history. It asks what remains unheard and how those absences influence our understanding of the world.

At The Loft, works are brought together in new contexts, while loans to museums and other exhibitions allow them to reach wider audiences.

Will he ever slow down? “Why limit? I’m still young and fresh,” he answers.