Fabrice Hyber is today one of the world’s most well known French artists. Awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial in 1997, his work has found recognition among a wide public by its eclectic creativity. Whether recent works such as L’Artère – Le jardin des dessins (“The Artery - the garden of drawings”) at Parc de la Villette in Paris, inauguration planned in 2006, a gigantic puzzle in ceramics on 1001m2 relating the combat against AIDS or older works such as Le plus gros savon du monde (“The largest soap in the world”, recorded in the Guinness Book of Records, 1991), a self-portrait of sorts by the artist using 27 tons of soap, Hyber always slips through your fingers…

For the artist, what makes the world interesting is its complexity, its intrinsic diversity that cannot be restricted to a single vision but which must be conceived as a multiplicity of possibilities. Constantly changing, art does not « eliminate », it « adds » because it suggests different behaviour. Art must provide the means of access to all possibilities of action. For it to do this there must be exaggeration, the places where art is produced and diffused must multiply, and no matter what the materiality of the work, what counts is its capacity to trigger different behaviour.
Each of Hyber’s works is just an intermediate, progressive stage in this « work in process » conceived in the form of a gigantic rhizome, reflecting the structurings and proliferation of thought.

However, rarely presented by the artist at exhibitions, the paintings, the homeopathic paintings – summaries of moments of creations and principles of the artist’s thoughts – and the drawings are at the root of all his creations, the instantaneous expression of the outpouring of his ideas, the privileged terrain of his experimentations.
For his first personal exhibition in the gallery, Hyber will present, exclusively, a series of paintings and works on paper. Through these works the artist offers us the opportunity to grasp his method of creation and production, an essential stage in the execution of a work since it is at that point that everything happens. Indeed, the act of drawing enables Fabrice Hyber to seek out all the elements of a proposal, a situation, all the « possibilities » that a theme evokes for him in order to perceive its limits, enrich them and push them back as far as they can go.

Both an economic reality and an essential source of energy, a black oily substance drawn from the deep layers of the Earth’s crust, petroleum is fascinating on more than one count for Hyber, who very early became interested in the relationships between scales, biological rhythms and mechanisms of influence.
Varied mutations and transformations, associations of ideas and systems around this planetary phenomenon come together in the paintings and drawings shown in the gallery.

Hyber will also present his latest Peinture Homéopathique n°23 (homeopathic painting). Conceived as summary works, amassing writings, drawings and photographs frozen under a layer of resin, the homeopathic paintings are, for the artist, visual assessments, story-boards, a sort of concentration of his mental path. The drawings become elements of a whole, stuck on the canvas like shocks, or indigestible ideas that need to be ingested one by one, in little doses, to facilitate the «digestion» of these troubling elements, the paintings are presented as candies, coated in suger, resin or glue.
Whilst Fabrice Hyber’s approach presents thoughts as a constellation, drawings and paintings are for him homothetic with the human body that the artists considers, above all, as a play area. This constant oscillation characterises the inherent diversity of the artist’ work and illustrates the structuring choice that is his, that of fluidity, the flux that nothing stops.


PRESS CONTACT : Emmanuelle de Noirmont
Tel : +33 (0)1.42.89.89.00 / Fax : +33 (0)1.42.89.89.03 / E-mail : info@denoirmont.com
IMAGES : 300 dpi images available on our website
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