Jan Fabre. Oro Rosso sculture d'oro e corallo, disegni di sangue / Jan Fabre. Oro Rosso Golden and Coral Sculptures, Blood Drawings

JAN FABRE ORO ROSSO
press conference Tuesday 26 March, 2019
11.30 am Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte (second floor)

• 1.30 pm - Studio Trisorio
• 3.00 pm - Pio Monte della Misericordia * 4.00 pm - MADRE Museum
• transfers with dedicated shuttle

Jan Fabre. Oro Rosso
Golden and Coral Sculptures, Blood Drawings Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte
Via Miano 2, Napoli
30 March – 15 September 2019

Jan Fabre. The Man Who Bears the Cross
Pio Monte della Misericordia Via dei Tribunali 253, Napoli
30 March - 30 September 2019

Jan Fabre. Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo
Studio Trisorio
Riviera di Chiaia 215, Napoli 29 March – 30 September 2019

Jan Fabre. The man who measures the clouds
Museo Madre
Via Luigi Settembrini 79, Napoli 30 March – 30 September 2019

The world-renowned Belgian artist Jan Fabre returns to Naples with a new project that engages four of the city’s most prestigious locations: the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte, the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, the Studio Trisorio gallery, and the Madre Museum.
Tuesday 26 March at 11.30 am at the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte (second floor) the press conference in the presence of the artist and the heads of the institutions involved with a visit to the exhibition. A dedicated shuttle bus will then bring journalists to the Studio Trisorio (1.30 pm), to the Pio Monte della Misericordia (3.00 pm) and finally to the MADRE Museum (4.00 pm).
At the Capodimonte Museum, the artist will exhibit a group of works in concert with select masterpieces from the museum’s permanent collection and from other Neapolitan museums.
The exhibition, entitled Oro Rosso. Golden and Coral Sculptures, Blood Drawings and curated by Stefano Causa in collaboration with Blandine Gwizdala, will open March 30th. The exhibition shows sculptures in gold and drawings in blood created by the artist from the 1970’s to the present day. Also on display will be a series of dazzling and never- before-seen sculptures in coral, executed especially for Capodimonte.
The works of Jan Fabre will be placed in dialogue with masterpieces of painting and splendid decorative art objects from the Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque periods that have been selected by Stefano Causa. The curator remarks, “Fabre recounts the act of continual metamorphosis using a language that is not unlike transformation itself. From materials that have changed destinations and functions, he tells a story of blood, bodily humor, tricks, and sensory illusions. He uses precious stones, coral, and beetles to evoke the interior of an Egyptian tomb. He takes fragments of ancient armor, sequences of numbers, and citations from the Scriptures and places them within a centrifugal universe of signs. Fabre’s work becomes a sort of profuse, mossy undergrowth that brings to mind the brushstrokes of the great Flemish still life painters.”
The gold sculptures in the exhibition lend a corporal presence to the artist’s ideas on creation, on art, and on his connection with the great masters of the past. With the drawings in blood, however, we return to the process of experimentation and the manifestation of the poetic, the physical, and the intimate, which taken together form the most profound motivations of the artist.
“Blood, today, is gold,” says Jan Fabre, and in the exhibition at Capodimonte the artist stages an entire universe of symbols that address art and beauty, the strength and fragility of human beings, and the cycle of life-death-rebirth.
Coral has been called “red gold” for its precious nature and its apothecary value. As the art critic Melania Rossi writes in her text for the exhibition catalogue published by Electa: “The red coral sculptures that the Belgian maestro has created for his solo exhibition at the Capodimonte Museum are like a treasure coming forth from the abysses of the artist’s mind. Conglomerations that bring to mind fantastic coral reefs form some of the shapes dearest to the art- ist: skulls, anatomical hearts, crosses, swords and daggers. These, in turn, are encrusted with images and signs that allude to other meanings and stories, in a continuous series of connections creating ancient hybrids between nature and symbol, new idols between past and future”.
Also on March 30th, curated by Melania Rossi, Jan Fabre’s sculpture entitled The Man Who Bears the Cross (2015) will be visible in the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in direct contact with Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Works of Mercy (1606-07). The sculpture, made entirely in wax, is a self-portrait of the artist based on the face of his uncle Jaak Fabre in the act of balancing a cross over two meters high in the palm of his hand. This modern twist on the genre of the self-portrait sees Fabre take leave of himself, becoming “everyman”, a reflection of all of us.
The curator writes: “The Man Who Bears the Cross is the representation of introspection. It is the celebration of doubt. And with its placement in Pio Monte della Misericordia, it is as if the sculpture establishes an eighth act of mercy: comfort those in doubt. Truth and beauty overlap in Caravaggio’s painting in incredible ways. The master’s altarpiece is an extraordinary cross-stitch of light and dark in which the mission to depict the reality of what it meant to be human in the seventeenth century reaches its highest expression. An artist of our own time, Jan Fabre’s entire body of work pursues the same objective. The cycle of life-death-rebirth is central to his thinking. In Fabre’s work religion and science permeate one another, creating both a visual art and a praxis in which the human body unites with abstract symbols”. The encounter between Caravaggio’s baroque style and the modern Flemish vision of Jan Fabre is a passing of the torch between artistic past and present and will certainly provoke new reflections.
The historic Studio Trisorio gallery will display a selection of Fabre’s works that are created using green iridescent wing cases of the jewel beetle. The exhibition, entitled Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo curated by Melania Rossi and Laura Trisorio, will open March 29th. It will showcase large, mosaic-like panels and sculptures made with jewel beetle wing cases, which are inspired by the violent and tragic history of colonization in the Belgian Congo. In these works historical events fuse with the medieval symbolism made by the great Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, especially his masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights (1480-90). Bosch’s hellscape, so admired for its daring creativity, became in all too many ways the horrifying reality in the Congo. Fabre’s artworks explore precisely this combination of artistic form and real-life subject. In these works Jan Fabre collides the cruelty of action with the beauty of presentation. Through a plurality of representations of human existence, the artist transports visitors to an unknown world, a far-off place as mythic as it is concrete—between Heaven and the Belgian Congo, where liberty is merely an illusion.
Also from March 30, the Madre Museum, under the curatorship of Andrea Viliani, Melania Rossi and Laura Trisorio, will host a preview of the iconic sculpture The man who measures the clouds (2018), in a unpublished version in Carrara marble, set up in the courtyard of honor of the regional museum of contemporary art. After the presentation in 2008 and 2017 of the bronze version of the same sculpture in Piazza del Plebiscito and on the terrace of the museum, Jan Fabre returns to celebrate to the Madre Museum the ability to imagine, dream and learn by raising above our destiny as human beings. As an artist and researcher Fabre constantly tries to measure the clouds, or to declare with his work that if the tension towards knowledge has impassable limits, it is however possible to express the inexpressible through the artistic research, and therefore to give representation to the intrinsic beauty human and universal.

Press office
Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte Luisa Maradei
081 7499281
333 5903471 [email protected]