![\"Fabrice-Samyn_Beyond](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Buis_Fabrice-Samyn_Beyond-Eros-and-Thanatos-1-scaled.jpg\")
Beyond Eros and Thanatos,<\/em> 2012. <\/em>
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Samyn\u2019s pictorial evocation recalls the customs of sects or religious communities undermined by atheism and for which sacrificial rituals are central. It is not a matter of celebrating the past but rather a desire to shed new light on works that are several centuries apart and to disrupt our chronological reference points so as to offer a better reading of the figure of the martyr. The images in these works are reduced not only to Manichaean avatars but also to incantatory entities seeking a speaker. By sketching historical conjectures, the trajectory of Beyond Eros and Thanatos<\/em> refreshes our perspective on a classical technique and motif that we might otherwise judge as obsolete. Familiarity and analytical distance clash in this painting where the gaze of the execution victim seems to have already left the terrestrial world: a theurgical vibration is born from the flat surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this in mind, Samyn\u2019s plastic explorations chart a path to a conceptual and spiritual reception of the work, which gives the creator\u200a\u2014\u200aof the illusion and content\u200a\u2014\u200athe virtues of an iconoclastic magician. Such a heterogeneous practice allows the artist to make connections between all his sculptures, paintings, and installations and respond to the iconographic demands of a society of the image, in which the gaze is constantly solicited and which often fuses the emotional sphere with iconodule visuals. Black is Virgin<\/em> (2016), an installation of nine figurines that resemble votive objects or funeral candles, is a convincing iteration. Their ambiguous aesthetic suggests an imminent liquefaction that would transmute them into a new form and shatter the saintly image of the Immaculate Conception. In this work, beliefs and the collective imagination merge, making room for the animist dimension that is important to the artist: form and content come together to infuse the objects with their own energy. The magical power that we attribute to symbols and images is made explicit by these modest statuettes with unidentifiable faces. Their symbolic power\u200a\u2014\u200awhich could make a plea for or launch into a diatribe about religious cults\u200a\u2014\u200acreates a space of inquiry in which the introspective function mixes with solemn artifice, blurring the boundaries between the secular and the confessional.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The balance sways between the de-idealization of mythical figures and the emphasis of their power, which underscores a fragile equilibrium. This simultaneously harmonious and precarious incarnation is reflected in Alors que tu es le temps <\/em>(2009), an oversized hourglass without sand, silvered like a mirror, and inspired by the vanitas popular in the 17th century and the precariousness of human existence. By capturing the reflection of the person looking into its silvered surface, the object brings viewers face-to-face with themselves and their own concepts of time. Whether embedded into our day-to-day according to a mathematical logic or whether the hours flow without our being aware of their progress, the concept of time remains a familiar yet nebulous notion: direct intuition and conscious memory permeate the material. The work thus creates an association between its plastic vacuity and the chronological purpose with which we imbue it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The hourglass, an allegory of the fleetingness of time and a receptacle of its movement, teaches us the limitations of the world, of our existence and its intangibility: in the absence of a universal vision, it offers us the uniqueness of projective power.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The laconic dimension of Samyn\u2019s artworks gives them whatever divine virtue we may grant them while reconsidering the sacred as something \u201cout of reach,\u201d according to the artist\u2019s terms. Samyn\u2019s practice does not have a melancholic or anxiety-provoking relationship to time, but simply represents an attempt to concretize and reveal the subconscious projections that arise from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inspired by old photographic techniques, What Reveals Erases<\/em> (2012) was created through a chemical process by which potassium and sunlight become the agents inscribing the image onto the fabric. This \u201cspell\u201d traces a fiery path and metamorphoses the initial burn into a sepulchral imprint and original emblem; the fragility of the image stems from that which gives it life: light. The process echoes One Regeneration Apart<\/em> (2019), an installation composed of agave flowers to which the artist applied gold leaf: as inflorescences destined to be born in order to die, they contaminate us with their seemingly supernatural expression. The work emphasizes the vital energy of nature and the cycle of life, as the curvatures of the plants evoke the foetus, maturity, and degeneration all at once. As with the series of Virgins in Black is Virgin<\/em>, the flowers are laid out in a way that can be described as commemorative. Imbued with theatrical sacredness, the serial arrangement and the flower\u2019s seeming insignificance combined with the use of gold leaf gives the modest plant an ecliptic language that underscores the substantial and even divine character of nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the performative work Fate Piece I – Activation III: Fate for River<\/em> (2010), the public is solicited to participate and engage in a holistic relationship evident in the object, as it is the public who brings about the artistic process. Participants are asked first to give the artist a stone\u200a\u2014\u200afound on the street or while out on a walk\u200a\u2014\u200aand then to go to the artist\u2019s studio to see him engrave their palm lines onto the stone. This narrative process connects each person\u2019s destiny to that of the object according to a ritualized protocol; once the stone has been engraved, the person disposes of it in a symbolic manner: by breaking it on their brother\u2019s grave, by losing it in the forest of their childhood, by drowning it in a river. The participatory work is thus situated between shamanic ceremony and psychomagic, putting distance between itself and a way of thinking that is not spiritual but superstitious. \u201cI am my shadow, its shape is my design, as I am as much yesterday as I am tomorrow and just as much as both of them,\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> 2 <\/a> - See Fabrice Samyn\u2019s brief artist\u2019s statement in the Visitor\u2019s Guide designed to accompany the exhibition Fabrice Samyn: To see with ellipse<\/em> presented at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels from 15 October 2021\u200a\u2014\u200a13 February 2022, accessible online.<\/span> Samyn writes in an incantational formulation, by which he extracts the paradoxical aspect of our relationship to occult forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These unusual and unremarkable abstractions influence the perception of what we call \u201cspiritual\u201d by transgressing our system of reference. When this system is based on abstract concepts such as destiny, good omens, or bad luck, it traps us into a castrating mindset, in which the prospect of an uncontrollable future disrupts the thinking process: Samyn\u2019s work reinjects desires and anxieties into everyday objects and circumscribes pernicious beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Various poetic and iconographic forms result from this plastic art process that metamorphose into stories-rituals and cross the boundaries of time and of parallel worlds. Their revelatory power constitutes an anachronistic space-time that unfreezes representations to trigger self-awareness: introspection occurs \u201cwith and without the knowledge\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> 3 <\/a> - Roger Munier, Le su et l\u2019insu<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 2005, our translation). This book is important to Samyn\u2019s work.<\/span> of the public, whose interpretative power is the only prophecy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To see with ellipse<\/em> (2021\u200a\u2212<\/em>22), an exhibition of Samyn\u2019s works presented at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, underscores the dark side that is part of every gaze, and through this dark side, the power of ideas and the interinfluence of the elements. The past and the object\u2019s resilience are embodied through the material transubstantiation that the artist operates by making it art. Contemporary art thus becomes a return to foundational rituals, whether they be banal or daring: between solemn soliloquy and constant dialogism, the dualism found in artistic reflection creates a powerful alchemy. Capable of awakening spiritual energy in each of us, the aesthetic\u200a\u2014\u200ain which abstraction and eloquence meet\u200a\u2014\u200aof structures and the presence with which they seem to be suffused make a circular interpretation possible. Our mental and artistic images are then contorted, echoing the agave flowers transmuted into a \u201cdeliberately enigmatic momentum.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> 4 <\/a> - Antonin Artaud, \u0152uvres<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 130 (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioae<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Fabrice-Samyn_BlackIsVirgin\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Buis_Fabrice-Samyn_BlackIsVirgin-1-scaled.jpg\")
Black is Virgin, <\/em>2016.
Photo : courtesy fo the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Fabrice-Samyn_OneRegenerationApart\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Buis_Fabrice-Samyn_OneRegenerationApart-1-scaled.jpg\")
One Regeneration Apart<\/em>, 2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Fabrice-Samyn_FatePieceOne\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Buis_Fabrice-Samyn_FatePieceOne-1-scaled.jpg\")
Fate Piece I \u2013 Activation III: The Work of Fate,<\/em> 2010.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n