Dialogue #04
Fabrice Samyn
You See Best in Winter the Nest
22 March - 8 June
Joana P.R.Neves (exhibition text)
In a departure from his more detailed and figure-oriented paintings, Fabrice Samyn created a series titled “En verité je vous le dis, seul en hiver se voient les nids” (2020-21) [in truth, I tell you, nests are only seen in winter], presented here for the first time. “Truth” is a compelling word in this context and in the wider scope of Samyn’s work, concerned with existential markings of times past, present and to come. The series, comprised of fifteen paintings representing the decreasing luminosity of the twilight, captures an ephemeral moment of change. The title reveals another kind of bittersweet truth: the beautiful architecture of birds is most visible when they are at their most vulnerable, in winter; equally, the trees are drawn against the backdrop of impending darkness as the day is turning to night.
The journey from the visible to the invisible brings about unsuspected clarity. For the artist, this was the realisation of a shared vulnerability: his body was also recuperating from surgery, and we were, between 2020 and 2021, when they were produced, in the throes of a mysterious pandemic. Hence, the canvases are sized in relation to the artist’s body finding his strength again – 150 x 200 cm.
The compelling use of oil paint, which allows Samyn to work in layers, carries with it the tradition of painting as the main vehicle of images, before industrialisation. That is, oil painting sustained the visible world and its truth, as well as the invisible spirit of divinity and the sacred. Nevertheless, here we are in the twenty-first century, keenly aware of the sixth mass extinction, a truth that is as great in dimension as it is invisible to the naked eye in real time. Hence, oil painting, with its connection with the sacred, engages here nonetheless with the iconoclastic school of monochromatic painting, and conceptual art, and, perhaps even more importantly, with their embodied practice, which verges on ritual. Which can be seen as a commitment with the sacred, again. (Samyn’s work The Galleries (2020), rectangular empty frames made with wood and gold leaf, resembles the “templum”, a makeshift square Roman divinators lifted to the sky to foresee the future in the flight of birds crossing that sacred space).
To wit: the artist went to the park, observed the trees spreading against the dusk, and returned quickly back to his studio to retrace the calligraphy of the branches. Each brushstroke was guided by his breath, not unlike Irma Blank’s blue Radical Writings from the 1990s.
This is an exercise of embodied availability and attention. Another work to be activated by the public, “Sit and see light as a feather” (2022), echoes this ethos. The blue of the twilight is replicated on a rectangular fabric on the floor on top of which a stool made of wood gnawed by bugs invites one to sit for a minute, meditating in front of a small log of wood from the same tree bearing a human bone atop of which is erected a yellow parakeet feather. Samyn does not work alone; he collaborates with birds and bugs, with the air, in and out of his body. The exhibition is a space to share this in-betweenness between the profane and the sacred, between the unseen progression of climatic change and the invisible truth of presence.
The time of the image is not the time of nature, nor is it the time of history, to paraphrase and twist Georges Didi-Huberman’s philosophy. Mayahuel, a work from 2018, establishes this strange paradox: do images carry meaning or is meaning a territorialisation of the image somewhere with someone despite of the vicissitudes of its coming to being?
Mayahuel is made with dried agave flowers from Lisbon, bearing blue dots of paint at the tips of their flower stalks. Historically, this plant arrived in Europe in the 16th century, brought by the invasion of South America by the Portuguese and the Spanish. Agave became a symbol of imperialist power in Europe whereas in Aztec culture, Mayahuel was the goddess associated with it, signifying fertility, health, dance and longevity. Displayed in a triangle on the wall like a geometric ex-voto, from the longest flower to the shortest at the top, the shape created by these specimens is ambivalent. Does the plant carry the meaning assigned to it? Does it carry the irreducible quality of the relations it bears to ecosystems? Do images?
The artist carefully draws these questions with gold leaf marking - celebrating? - the insect’s gnawed paths in the wood of “Sit and see light as a feather”; or with the carefully placed parakeet feather on the knots of the wood in the series Enlightenment (2024); and by providing birds with a nest made with a varnished egg in « Egg Nest » (2011): origins and endings are reversed, histories are rearranged, puzzling us as much as the swarms of parakeets that have mysteriously taken over the parks in Brussels, affecting the local ecosystem, not unlike the agave plant.
Vinciane Despret[1] wrote about birds’ “territorialisation”. She detailed how terribly anthropomorphic we are when analysing “territory” from the animal’s perspective, in particular birds. Birds territorialize, that is, they chose a place from whence to be seen and heard, rather than a property to be defended against competitors. Perhaps, in the exhibition, the viewer is invited to share this form of territorialisation with the bird, moving, breathing, and even, perhaps, chanting.
[1] Vinciane Despret, Habiter en oiseau, Actes Sud, 2019.
Joana P.R. Neves
