Facing time. Rops / Fabre
Namur, several locations
14.03.2015 - 30.08.2015
The starting point of this exhibition is a posthumous invitation from Félicien Rops to Jan Fabre, whom he welcomes into the museum dedicated to him and into various locations throughout his native city. The conversation between Rops and Fabre, beyond time, unsettles, shakes and questions.
‘Facing Time’ invites the visitor to a face-to-face encounter between two artists separated by two centuries of history and artistic development. Modernity, techniques and themes—everything is subject to change. It is through time and through the gaze that the parallels and affinities between Fabre and Rops enter into dialogue.
“’Facing Time’: Rops and Fabre quite literally confront time; they travel through the time they reveal, question and challenge. Rops declared, ‘Rops I am, another I do not wish to be,’ and Fabre states, ‘I am a movement unto myself.’ These are clearly two independent avant-garde artists, creating a reality of their own in which they firmly believe, and addressing universal problems and themes in their work. Both are knights of a romantic era, living according to their inner clock and their own rules, fighting with total commitment while also exposing their vulnerability and demonstrating self-irony. ‘Facing Time’ speaks of their mastery of time.”
On the occasion of this exhibition, Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of the novel ‘The Last Days of Charles Baudelaire’ (Grasset, 1988), offers a philosophical reading of the Baudelairean visions present in both bodies of work.
↓“If I had to steal a work from a museum, it would be Pornocratie by Félicien Rops,” Jan Fabre declared in an interview in 2011. Indeed, the universes of the two Belgian artists resonate strongly with one another: the drives of life and death, sexuality, and corporeality.
“When Jan Fabre discovered the work of Félicien Rops in the 1970s, he was immediately fascinated by the masterful imagination of the artist: by the subjects Rops addresses in his drawings, paintings, engravings, letters and illustrations, and by the way he represents them; by his caricatures and his ecstatic and vulnerable bodies; by his realistic rendering of skin, flesh and skeleton; and by the very particular interest he shows in women in all their facets. He was equally captivated by the voluptuousness and refinement openly exuded by his déshabillés, and finally by the ode Rops offers to life, in all that is both beautiful and terrifying.
Jan Fabre sees in Rops an ally who created a world of his own and a distinct, unconventional language. One who, through a poetic and fiery idiom, opposed the comfort of a familiar environment. One who demonstrated intransigence, subversion and total abandon, but also integrity and irony. One who never ceased to be his own accomplice. One who repeated not for the sake of repetition, and reproduced not for the sake of reproduction, but in order to reinterpret and perpetuate the universe he had made his own.”
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