Jan Fabre in Naples dialogues with Caravaggio and brings historic and previously unseen works to four venues

From March 29, Jan Fabre (Antwerp, 1958), one of the greatest contemporary artists, arrives in Naples for four new events in as many venues. From March 29 to September 30, 2019, Studio Trisorio is hosting the exhibition Jan Fabre. Homage to Hieronymus Bosch in the Congo. Then, from March 30 to Sept. 30, at Pio Monte della Misericordia the public will see the event Jan Fabre. The Man Holding the Cross and, at the Museo Madre, Jan Fabre. The Man Who Measures the Clouds. Finally, the main exhibition is at the National Museum of Capodimonte, from March 30 to September 15: it is the Jan Fabre exhibition. Red Gold. Gold and Coral Sculptures, Blood Drawings.

A citywide project, therefore. At the Capodimonte Museum, the exhibition Oro Rosso, curated by Stefano Causa and Blandine Gwizdala, will see Fabre display some of his works in dialogue with a special selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection and other Neapolitan museums. In particular, Fabre will bring to the Campania capital scultire in gold and blood drawings created from the 1970s to the present, as well as a previously unseen series and red coral sculptures made especially for Capodimonte. Fabre’s works give substance to his ideas about creation, art, and his relationship with the great masters of the past. And in the blood drawings, part of his earliest production, we find the deepest motivations for his actions, which drive him to create art: “blood today is gold,” Fabre emphasizes. A kind of poetic and physical manifesto at the same time.

“Fabre tells, in a not-too-different language,” points out curator Stefano Causa, “a story of incessant metamorphosis; of materials that change their destination and function; a story of blood and bodily humors, deceptions and traps of meaning; precious stones, corals and scarabs, coming out of the remnants of an Egyptian tomb, fragments of armor, sequences of numbers and quotations from Scripture, withina centrifugal universe of signs .... which, at times, becomes an undergrowth into which to descend with the brushstrokes of a Flemish still life specialist.”

“The ten new red coral sculptures that the Belgian master has created for his solo exhibition at the Capodimonte Museum,” points out critic Melania Rossi, on the other hand, “seem like a treasure from the depths of the artist’s mind. Concretions that suggest fanciful coral reefs take on some of Fabre’s most cherished forms: skulls, anatomical hearts, crosses, swords and daggers. They, in turn, then studded with images and signs that allude to other meanings and other stories, in a continuous cycle of connections until they create ancient hybrids between nature and symbolism, new idols between past and future.”

The event at Pio Monte, on the other hand, brings to Naples one of Fabre’s masterpieces, The man who bears the cross (“L’uomo che sorregge la croce”) from 2015, which will be placed in dialogue with Caravaggio ’s Seven Works of Mercy to open reflections on seventeenth-century and present-day religiosity but also on the transitions between past and contemporary artists. The work (which we discussed in an in-depth article on these pages) is a self-portrait of the artist holding a cross over two meters high in the palm of his hand. "TheMan Holding the Cross (2015)," points out curator Melania Rossi, “is a representation of questioning, it is a celebration of doubt, and with its placement inside the Pio Monte della Misericordia it seems to add an eighth Work ofMisericordia: comforting those who doubt. In Caravaggio’s painting, the beautiful and the true coincide admirably, and his work is an incredible interweaving of light and dark in which the desire to represent the truth of the human being of the 1600s finds full satisfaction. All the research of Jan Fabre, an artist of our time, goes in the same direction; the life-death-rebirth cycle is central to his thought in which religion and science, symbol and body interpenetrate in a brilliant vortex of images and actions.”

The event at Madre, curated by Andrea Villani, Melania Rossi and Laura Trisorio, features a never-before-seen Carrara marble version of one of Fabre’s most famous works, The Man Who Measures Clouds, and will be placed in the museum’s Courtyard of Honor. The work thus returns to Naples, although at the time, the first time in 2008 and the second time in 2017, the bronze version had arrived, placed respectively in Piazza del Plebiscito and on the terrace of the Madre. The Man Who Measures Clouds is famously inspired by the statement that ornithologist Robert Stroud uttered at the moment of his release from Alcatraz prison, when he declared that from then on dedicated to “measuring clouds.” As an artist and researcher, Fabre is, in effect, constantly attempting to measure the clouds, that is, to declare through his work that if the tension toward knowledge has insurmountable limits, it is nevertheless possible to express the inexpressible through artistic research, and thus give representation to the intrinsic and foundational human and universal beauty.

Finally, at the historic Studio Trisorio gallery, the exhibition Homage to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo will display a selection of Fabre’s works made entirely from iridescent beetle shells. The exhibition, curated by Melania Rossi and Laura Trisorio, will feature large panels and mosaic sculptures of beetles inspired by the sad and violent history of the colonization of the Belgian Congo. In these works, historical inspiration is combined with medieval symbolism drawn from one of the greatest Flemish artists and one of Jan Fabre’s putative masters, Hieronymus Bosch, and in particular from his masterpiece The Garden of Delights of 1480-1490. Bosch’s inferno, admired for its distinct inventiveness, in many ways became a gruesome reality in the BelgianCongo. The artwork is precisely this unique combination of form and content. The artist takes us to an undefined zone between Paradise and the Belgian Congo, to an illusion of freedom, to a faraway place ,both mythical and concrete, through a polysemy of images of human existence.

Pictured: The man who bears the cross by Jan Fabre at the center of Pio Monte della Misericordia.

Source: press release

Jan Fabre in Naples dialogues with Caravaggio and brings historic and previously unseen works to four venues

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