Jan Fabre: The Quiet Source

A critical and poetic journey through the work of Jan Fabre, recounted in a monograph dedicated to his new exhibition at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice.

A critical and poetic journey through the work of Jan Fabre, recounted in a monograph dedicated to his new exhibition at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. Moving away from any rhetoric of monumentality, this work explores the delicate and subtle dialogue between the Belgian artist and Tintoretto: a vision in which art no longer seeks the grand narrative of history, but the fragile and silent intensity of the smallest gestures.

Announcing the Belgian artist’s return to Venice, the publication aims to offer a profound perspective not only on the exhibition, but on Jan Fabre’s sculptural work. Intimate, minimalist figures – yet at the same time so intense – radically reconfigure the space, not by occupying it, but by inhabiting it from within. Situated between hypervisibility and disappearance, silence and excess, matter and light, Jan Fabre’s work reveals a practice that occupies a middle ground: a suspended territory where sculpture becomes an existential device and where, beyond all scale and hierarchy, an infinite poetic horizon emerges silently.

Jan Fabre, a Belgian visual and theatre artist and writer, is one of the most versatile and visionary figures on the contemporary art scene. His artistic practice ranges from drawing to sculpture, from installation to performance, exploring the body, metamorphosis, time and the fragility of existence. Fabre has developed an artistic language that conceives of art as an ethical exercise and as a concrete form of understanding reality.

His work has been the subject of major international solo exhibitions, including the 2008 exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the 2016 exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.