Fabrice Hybert

The French artist Fabrice Hybert (b. 1961) grabbed the artworld’s attention in the late 1990s with conceptual works that imitated common aspects of society. For instance, in 1995 he set up a hair salon in Centre Pompidou. Later that same year he created a supermarket in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1997 he turned the entire French pavilion at the Venice Biennial into a makeshift television studio. In Rotations #2 we present Homeopathic Painting No. 11 (1996) and the video/sculpture work Pof No. 2, Deep Narcissus (1997).

The large Homeopathic Painting No. 11 spreads across the wall and explodes all traditional formats. It belongs to a larger series of homeopathic paintings Hybert began in 1986, and was his first formulation of a research project on the 'origin of form'. The homeopathic paintings are complex works that combine text, photos, photocopies, drawings and whatnot into narratives. Here we find pictures showing the artist wedged between inflatable globes. There are also drawings of animals and photos of Hybert in the company of animals. His research projects cover an exceedingly wide range of topics – everything from cellular biology, ecology and weather to geological formations and even to formulas for chemical reactions. He allows his mind to wander freely and be sidetracked by chance associations. As part of the homeopathic series, this work refers to the basic principle of homeopathy, the ‘law of similars’. The principle is this: a drug that can produce certain symptoms of a disease in a healthy person can also start a process that cures the same symptoms in an ill person, provided the dosage is right. Hybert conjectures that this work functions in the same way. He made it while living in Jerusalem in 1996 and intended it to function as an antidote to religious conflicts in the Middle East.

The diver’s mask in Pof No. 2, Deep Narcissus is an example of how ideas emerge via associative drawings and paintings and become real functional objects. The acronym POF (Prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement – prototypes of functional objects) underscores the mask’s value as a useful object (even though its present usefulness has more in common with Surrealism than with the needs of most people). The attending video shows an extravagant transvestite modeling the mask.

Built from free association, Hybert’s paintings and narratives can sometimes be compared to the painting style of the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard. Many have also compared Hybert to Andy Warhol because of his ideas about situating artworks in the commercial circuit. In 1994 Hybert founded a company called Unlimited Responsibility. It enabled him to produce prototypes of objects which were then manufactured and sold. In this way he earned money without needing to rely on a gallery owner. This working method has now become more common, but Fabrice Hybert was one of the first artists who emancipated himself from the gallery circuit and laid the groundwork for a new kind of relationship between the artist and commercial society.

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