CAPRI - Curious hybrid beings with fish bodies and human faces resting on perfectly detailed brains, but also enigmatic figures in diving suit ready to dive into the unknown to explore new worlds and thus satisfy their inexhaustible desire for knowledge: everything moves on the edge of the imagination the exhibition by Jan Fabre entitled "Homo aquaticus and his planet", scheduled at the Certosa di San Giacomo until 30 September.
Inaugurated on 7 July, and curated by Melania Rossi, the exhibition - promoted by the Campania Museums Regional Directorate and created by Studio Trisorio, with the patronage of the City of Capri - focuses on the relationship between man and the mysterious sea depths, focusing on water understood as a vital and original element.
But along the way,
which consists of 16 sculptures in Carrara marble and black Belgian marble on which the Antwerp artist has worked in the last four years, the protagonist is also the brain, the organ in which human thought forms and is based: Indeed, in his drawings, sculptures and film-performances, Fabre has carried out his own artistic research on the brain in the last 20 years, also in discussions with scientists who are experts in biology and neuroscience.
While the works, installed in the church of the fourteenth-century complex, trigger a dialectical confrontation with the spirituality of the environments that host them, on the other they suggest to the visitor a simple, yet poetic truth: 'water is not separating from the world or seeking an escape,
but it is probably returning to its place of origin, where the source of life began and continues to regenerate itself.
Visual artist and theatrical author, considered one of the most innovative figures in the international contemporary art scene, as well as the first contemporary artist to carry out solo exhibitions at the Louvre Museum in Paris (2008) and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg (2017), Fabre in this installation in the oldest monastery of Capri takes up the vision of the great French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau: the latter had imagined a voluntary evolution of man towards life under water, partly by natural adaptation and partly with the intervention of technology.
Inspired by the studies on "Human fish", Fabre therefore tries to imagine in his hybrid figures the
missing link in the evolution of man from the sea to life on earth, conceiving unprecedented and surprising metamorphoses from man to fish and vice versa.
(HANDLE).