Need for air!

A faithful watchman, catalyst, or revelator, the artist speaks of our world. For this exhibition entitled "Fresh Air", Fabrice Hyber starts from an observation: "People are anxious about the virus, about war, about pollution, about nature... We try to protect ourselves from everything, and I told myself that it was perhaps the moment to give solutions and ask the right questions," he explains. That all these sources of anxiety become sources of enchantment. Relentlessly at the crossroads of science and art, the artist invents projects he dissects on the canvas, transforming into the painting of a scientist who explains his formulas, inventions, and research. Mixing poetic, utopian, metaphysical, but especially pragmatic proposals, he insists, he makes complex, unique, informative, speculative, and rich works: "they must make us think about everything, not to forget anything, to always redefine, they are quantum works ... " he says. So many experimental drawings allow us to enter the artist's mind as they are all linked together and part of a more global, rhizomatic system unfolding for over 30 years.

A question of survival

The exhibition begins with a Ted Hyber, the image of a plastic teddy bear that he presented in New York in 1998, which we put on like a second skin, a protective and vital shell that filters the air as we walk, and which is now at the SMAK in Ghent. The black Ted Hyber has become a possibility to protect oneself from external aggressions... Then, when one finds oneself in a vacuum, the question of food, breathing, agriculture, heating, survival, relations with others arises: hence these houses, which are both shelters and production systems. The shape is not totally that of a house anymore... The series of vegetables are flesh, almost animals, bodies... the original vegetables come from the Vendée valley where he resides (in the west of France). The valley he transformed partly into a forest in the '90s, sowing seeds of hundreds of thousands of trees, is his essential lieu of inspiration for a global experience. He creates and lives the hope and ambivalence presented and represented in these stories. Hence, the house spewing waste paradoxically feeds the landscape from which emerges the vital energy materialized by arrows. Language completes the list of these essential foods for our survival. Furthermore, in series such as "Fish and Fresh Air," the artist transforms the ocean so the fish, to escape their environment, go out of the sea during heavy rain yet just to be trapped into novel parameters.

Fresh Air

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