Jan Fabre. Feast of Little Friends
Belgrade, National Museum
21.02.2020 - 05.04.2020
This exhibition focuses in particular on Fabre’s fascination as a young visual artist. With insect drawings, insect sculptures, a ‘Spiders Heads theatre’ and a tent in the shape of a nose featuring a sensual laboratory, Belgrade National Museum is presenting key works by the artist. Throughout the years, he has created his own mythical universe, centered around themes of life and death, beauty and horror, fragility and violence, mortality and eternity.
At the end of the 1970’s Jan Fabre moves into the garden of his parent’s home and retreats to a simple one-man tent where he spends months sleeping, eating and pursuing his experimental art. During this so-called ‘Project for Nocturnal Territory’, he researches the behavior of the most little creatures. He follows their trail with pencils and Bic blue ballpoint pen and alters drawings into flying carpets. As a Dr. Fabre Frankenstein he creates ‘Fantasy-insect-sculptures’ in which insects are transformed into human instruments. Jan Fabre was inspired by the books of his namesake, the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, who devoted his writing to the mystical transition from night to day – L’Heure Bleue, or The Hour Blue – wherein the nocturnal creatures disappear and the diurnal creatures awaken.
↓Through heritage of first prints and a lot of publications of Jean-Henri Fabre, the Belgian artist draws, writes and gives associative artistic reactions on the content of his inspiration source. Jan Fabre creates in a rapid succession of series; he does so precisely, though not in the exclusively cataloguing manner of the entomologist. With a visible eye for detail, his works often comment on human activities and emotions. The natural metamorphosis of insects, of scarab beetles especially, becomes a symbol for human existence.
The researcher is not only an observer, not only a documentarian, but also a passionate, inventive artist. Through his large ‘Spiders Heads Theatre’ with real spiders Jan Fabre simulates a theatre of life or he analyses his “little friends” via microscope as would a scientist. Yet he does not record what he sees; instead looking inward for emerging images. His micro- and macrokosmos may serve as a second eye, but the medium per se remains imagination in all its colors and forms; visual genius and tactile appropriation. Feast of Little Friends, a Feast of the Senses.
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