The elastic art of Fabrice Hyber

“I dream of all the museums in the world becoming schools. Imagine kids seeing works of art every day! In the works they can describe the whole life of the world, so why bother: it’s already there! » While waiting for Fabrice Hyber's beautiful dream to perhaps come true one day, the visual artist's Valley can be visited currently and until April 30, 2023 at the Cartier Foundation for Art contemporary, in Paris. Exhibition rooms are transformed into classrooms. And works of art by Fabrice Hyber replace the blackboards. Here you have it, a funny art gallery!

But the Valley is not just this exhibition of around sixty paintings. It is also a real place that the artist created almost thirty years ago in his native Vendée countryside. “To protect my tribe, my family, from all the invasion of industrial agriculture around us,” he explains. His farmer parents were in fact retiring when he discovered, to his horror, that all these hectares of greenery which had never known the slightest pesticide were likely to switch to intensive agriculture with their new occupants. He was then 29 years old. His idea: “to be able to enter an invented landscape”. Make an imaginary work of art from real life. So he bought back this land from his childhood, sowed tree seeds there, and it is now a dream forest. “The trees are not planted, I prefer to sow them, it is the least traumatic method for the plant and for the earth, it is also that of the most complete learning! And too bad if it takes time. That's life. »

The one who defines himself as a quantum artist and who is now one of the most prominent in the world of contemporary art, the one whose works of art for sale are exported today throughout the world, made itself known at the very beginning of the 1990s with Translation-the Biggest Soap in the World, a twenty-two ton soap which would later be entered in the Guiness Book of Records! year, he produced an installation for the town of Bessines: a small anthropomorphic sculpture whose body orifices spit water. Like a virus, it continues to develop, spreading its little green men across the planet. Nothing new, according to Fabrice Hyber: “since Dürer, we have been making editions and, today, we are going so far as to multiply genes. You have to get used to it, it’s part of the game! »

This mathematics enthusiast, who studied science before finally entering the Nantes School of Fine Arts, caused a work in the shape of a gigantic rhizome to grow further and further around him. By creating systems linking artistic production to businesses and scientific research laboratories, in particular. He invariably starts from drawing and painting, but then brings together all possible and imaginable mediums. All means of expression are good for him. What the contemporary art magazine Artpress calls an “open artistic career”, in the article it devotes to Fabrice Hyber in its December issue. A symbolic number since it celebrates the 50th anniversary of Artpress, wanting to be witness to an expanded art world. So who better than Fabrice Hyber to talk about the expansion of art?

Since his first exhibition entitled Mutation took place in Nantes in 1986, until today, the artist has continued to demonstrate that art is accessible to everyone. That everyone can invent. Create. After establishing the status of artist-entrepreneur at the end of the 1980s, Fabrice Hyber began to irrigate his work with a playful dimension particularly perceptible in his famous POF (Prototypes of Objects in Operation). Since The POF n°65 square balloon to the POF n°24 shoulder string via The POF n°58 leaf tree or The endless game POF n°97, all born from a drawing, an idea or a conversation, Fabrice Hyber enjoys moving the original function of quantities of objects borrowed from our daily lives, as if to better demonstrate to us that for each choice made, an unlimited number of other possibilities exist and that it is up to the artist within us to reveal them.

Thus, whether it is L'Hybermarché at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, or Eau d'or, Eau dort, ODOR, a television studio for which he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997, or Chaosgraphy, 4 seasons by Vivaldi with Angelin Preljocaj, Hyber summons several dimensions in each of his artistic projects, without ever sticking to a defined visual vocabulary, investing in a multitude of writings and supports.

All of Fabrice Hyber’s work is participatory, supportive and ecological. A conversation with Paul Ardenne, critic and art historian who has followed his work for a long time, is published in this anniversary issue of Artpress. It is fascinating to discover this wandering creation making art of everything. And to reflect on this elasticity of art. Even if we know it since Duchamp or Fluxus, even if we know that everything can “become art” from the moment it is designated as such, Paul Ardenne believes that Fabrice Hyber has further broadened the concept of art. “Yes, I dreamed that everything could be a work,” the artist replies, “by imagining that we could all make works, whoever we are. Should we still call these creations works from elsewhere? We can also imagine, while starting to create together, things or things, everything that makes us love our lives. »

When Paul Ardenne asks him if a society where art takes over from production is a utopia, Fabrice Hyber recognizes that there is still work to be done in terms of ecology and responsibility. Even if its freedom of artistic expression relating to permanent extrapolation “can suggest in a chain proposals for objects, attitudes, research or even systems. Enough to endlessly expand the possibilities of art, in fact,” he nonetheless notes a deterioration in our attitude towards works of art. “Respect for art objects generates in ordinary times an attitude of conservation, maintenance. However, in the twenty-five years that I have been offering my POFs to the public, I have noticed this rather sad development: initially assimilated, carefully preserved, these POFs frequently find themselves degraded. »

But because Fabrice Hyber works with permanent relativity, he continues to create with joy, in particular... creative spaces for all. “It’s always amazing to see that what is weak somewhere or at one time is strong elsewhere or at another time. This balance nourishes me intellectually. »