Fabrice Samyn: Where Mystic Materiality Meets Subconscious Projections

Inseparable from the collective imagination and deep-rooted convictions, the allegories put forward in Fabrice Samyn’s works relate to a Western conception of temporality and put new life into our mental images by shifting symbolic motifs. For Samyn, the referential ambiguity transforms the artworks into unique entities endowed with animism, to the extent that their material nature seems to vibrate with a vital energy. With respect to tradition — particularly religious tradition — the artist adopts a simultaneously deferential and subversive attitude: not afraid to play with chronological discrepancies and popular secular references, his art practice doesn’t exclude irony. As a mythographer, he examines the ideological construction of icons and their concretization in reality and thus enjoys dismantling our prejudices against religious iconography while also underlining the esoteric power of such images.