Fabrice Samyn

Fabrice Samyn's painting illustrate one of the key themes of his work: the inevitable obsolescence of any representation. Rather than fixed images, the artist prefers forms that evoke flow, time and light, forms which “dress the unrepresentable”. In one of his series, the artist reproduces details of flames originally painted by Georges de La Tour (France, 1593–1652). Light becomes the essential subject of the painting. In this series, he is also interested in the notion of the original and the copy, particularly in painting details of the flames in two images of St Sebastian being tended by Irene, one from Berlin and the other from Paris, on which specialists' opinions differ. In his restored paintings, Fabrice Samyn expresses a very original pictorial research by partially and very precisely removing the varnish of old oil paintings from other artists. Working on ancient images with the care of a restorer, he gives a second blow of life to the paintings, by partly cleansing them of the dirt that has accumulated over the years. His intervention is not motivated by restoration, but by the desire to question notions of time and the sacred. Placing glass globes traditionally used to present the Virgin, clocks or bouquets of dried flowers, one inside the other, like Russian dolls, the artist explores more specifically the notions of time and eternity, repeating to infinity the display mode of the window case. Their illumination creates a significant play of light: while the outside light projects a corridor of shadows, the bulb at the base of the globes creates a 360° cathedral perspective. The simulacrum of perspective, traditionally defined according to a single viewpoint, is thus multiplied by all the possible viewing angles, and thus infinitely.

Devrim Bayar