Galleria Il Ponte presents the solo exhibition Knight of the Night by Jan Fabre, with a set of works created in different periods (1992 – 2013), which for the first time form a single narrative corpus centred around the courtly romance, one of the pivotal themes of the artist’s whole oeuvre.
The film Lancelot (2004), interpreted by Jan Fabre himself, depicting the hero’s battle against himself, constitutes the narrative plot of this Flemish saga. In its scenes, it is as if the marvellous sculptures in the panoply created by Fabre come to life through the magical intersecting of scarabs, which reverberate in and refract the light. In Salvator Mundi, giving shape to the courtly ideal, the human armour and the shell of the beetles become one. The human skulls – whose features are also built and traced by a layer of beetles, clasping prey, whips or penetrated by the keys of hell – are the materialisation of the dreams and nightmares that hover inside this night-time fairytale.
This exhibition reveals all of the images conjured up by the artist, as he takes his own body into the work and compares it with that of other individuals, in the attempt to metabolise them: “I want to become what I live, becoming what I want by modifying myself, freeing myself from known sensations and emotions, seeking a new body”, he states.
The works weave a dialogue with the spectators. They can’t just contemplate them, they have to transcend themselves, go beyond their mental and physical limits to enter the body of the work. In other words, they are invited to become the main subject of a metamorphosis. In order to demonstrate the individual’s endless potential, it is always metamorphosis – in this show of the tragic knightly hero – that Fabre sets out to investigate: that is, the undefined dimension of permanent change lived by man.