Jan Fabre (*1958)

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Jan Fabre, drawings from Witte Hypnose, 1998-2001 Jan Fabre, drawings from Witte Hypnose, 1998-2001

In his 1993 interview book, the artist Jan Fabre says, ‘I draw, and the marks I make are my way of speaking, of surviving, of understanding myself, and understanding what is happening to me. I get so many stimuli in the form of ideas, dreams, visions and experiences that I have to draw them otherwise I would forget my own turns of thought and feelings. In this way I have a small number of drawing projects that I work on quite regularly. Over the last 13 years I had drawn on the subject of my dreams or waking hours almost every day, at least one small drawing or scribble per day. It’s exciting to look at all those drawings. Sometimes I dream about this series of dream drawings. In addition to this there are the working drawings I note down in a sort of book of thoughts and from which I may use elements in my stage work years later.’ Whether he uses blue ballpen, pencil, blood or Indian ink, considering their nature and their total volume, his drawings form a body of dreams, thoughts, reflections, inventions and scenes comparable to a library packed full of diaries, a private encyclopaedia now extending to twenty-three volumes. With elegant modesty, White Hypnosis once again brings together a number of elementary characteristics/metaphors from his work; the night and the inevitable waking (insomnia rules), the notion of transformation, the mutual transitions between man and animal, and a tactile physical sensuality that assumes unexpected forms.

It is clear that the White Hypnosis series is one of the first sort that he describes: the dream drawings, done during the night in an ‘inspired’ state of silence, of wakefulness, prey to insomnia. Fabre has often emphasised the importance of the night, when one can escape from the hectic activity of the swarming daytime world of people, for example in the development of the concept of l’heure bleu. As his biography makes clear, Fabre has an individual and tense relationship with the ancient god of sleep, Hypnos, who, tradition has it, was the son of night and the brother of death.

There is not a single entirely realistic image in these dream drawings. Each and every one has ‘a deviation’ guided by the imagination. In the process of drawing and dreaming, the ear, whether it be human or animal, claims the leading role and transforms the subject. We see a man with three ears, a frog or a bird of prey with hare’s ears, ears like vaginas, ears like buds. Or, in the picture of the snail as an oracle, the reference to the snail-shell as part of the organ of hearing: ‘there is a compelling reason for its magnificent uselessness’. The ear becomes a complex and versatile organ, even erotic. Its internal bifurcations become a labyrinth of passageways. The subject, placed in the middle, is often surrounded by concentric circles which ripple out like the reproduction of sound. The acts of waking and listening are to be found everywhere. The elongated shell-like ears of the hare (sometimes referring to ‘the Flemish giant’, a breed of exceptionally large rabbits) are a useful metaphor which he transplants onto other living creatures like a surgeon/fantasist. The hare has excellent hearing and can detect danger. Its ears are antennae or scanners: they seek out and interpret sounds. In nature, the buck hare warns the colony by drumming if there is imminent danger. The silence of the night and therefore of drawing also makes you more sensitive to sound, and one makes up one’s own story... In other drawings the self appears to dissolve into the passages and the chambers of the organ of hearing: one becomes one’s own echo-chamber, where sound is able to disturb, heal, stupefy and lead a life of its own. Take for example the deaf musical genius Beethoven, complete with rampant hairstyle. Listening meant nothing to him: sounds set off within him and returned to him alone. In a particular portrait you see a young woman enjoying the bundle of sound, depicted as a stream, almost as an erotic perception, while in another the opening of the ear is pierced by a cord which connects the left and right ears. Each drawing in this series is strikingly effective visually: the line is bright and clear, the support is simple lined paper from the era, before computer printouts, when one filled exercise books with one’s best writing in fountain pen. The pre-printed graphic symmetry adds a pattern to what is drawn and gives it a manic, compulsive feel. As a series, the White Hypnosis drawings look both casual and obsessive. This is one of the explanations of their strength. According to the dictionary, hypnosis is ‘a state of altered consciousness with an increased concentration of attention in a limited field of perception’. Who is the hypnotist and who the hypnotised? ‘I think my drawings will provoke the public. They reveal a lot. And yet the drawings remain in their own self, their own world, their own mysteries, their own secret codes. I have discovered an ingenious game. They are cunning. They are better than me.’ (Jan Fabre in his diary, New York, 29th November 1985).

Hendrik Tratsaert, 19th October 2003

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