Jan Fabre ^©  

(1958)

Provenance:
Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium;
Private collection, Belgium

Exhibitions:
Jan Fabre / Battlefields & Beekeepers, Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium, 1999, illustrated in the exhibition catalog published by the Deweer Gallery;
Jan Fabre - Homo Faber, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten en M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium, from 13 May to 15 August 2006, illustrated in the exhibition catalog on pp. 34-35;
Jan Fabre - Hortus / Corpus, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Holland, from 10 April to 4 September 2011;

Certificate of authenticity signed by the artist

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Battlefield" is a powerful work that Jan Fabre (Antwerp, 1958) dedicates to insects and their being a part of the universal balance of all things. At the same time in this piece he reflects the desire to bring to the stage a modern war metaphor. Often the artist develops the projects that he wants to express through visions related to scarabs, also here very present: for him in fact they are the absolute paradigm of the human being.

As can be immediately understood from the name, in "Battlefield" the Belgian wants to reproduce a battle: the peculiarity is that instead of the soldiers swarming on the ground we see moths and beetles, busy moving mud and in a synchronic march towards the edges of the table.

On the table we see clearly the green carapaces of the beetles, able to absorb the light. In this situation they also remember us the armor of medieval knights (as it is written in presentation of the solo exhibition "Jan Fabre - Anthropology of a planet" set up at Palazzo Benzon, Venice, in 2007): the battlefield becomes metaphorically the one of all human kind, represented by the small animals of the piece.