Fabrice Hyber - La Foresta Invisibile - Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia

At the invitation of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and in parallel with La Biennale Architettura 2023, Fabrice Hyber creates La Foresta Invisibile [The Invisible Forest], an in-situ work addressing the future challenges the world will face, particularly ecological concerns.

 

Hyber, having studied sciences before enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (France), began producing works in the 1980s that garnered notice on the artistic scene. His practice of painting and drawing, the starting point for each of his projects, is a way for him to present hypotheses, dovetail ideas, invent forms and play with words. Traced on large canvases, many-branched trees, hybrid beings, modified objects, numbers and symbols reflect his proliferation of thought, open to many other techniques. He incorporates fields as varied as mathematics, neurosciences, commerce, history and astrophysics into the realm of art, along with love, the body, nature and living things. These last two are central to the work of this artist who has adopted green ("Hyber green") as his colour. Since the 1990s, he has been growing a forest deep in a valley in Vendée, in the Pays de la Loire region of western France, where he spent his childhood. These trees are integral to his work.

 

"Venice was built upon a vast forest of oak, larch and alder. Of these millions of trees, a few are coming back to life. They are sometimes glimpsed in the reflections, secret spaces and shadows of Venice. Here, they are crystallised in glass. I imagined a house within another house, blurring the perception of what is outside and what is inside. Then, in the glass of these houses, the trees of the Invisible Forest appear." (Fabrice Hyber)

 

Inside the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, Hyber is bringing the forest of Venice back to life: the trunks of trees planted in the silt several centuries ago to stabilise the islands made it possible to build the city. This forest of wooden pillars forms the city's base. Some of those tree trunks, long hidden and silent beneath the foundations, reappear here like ancient ghosts. Glass is an indelible element in the Venetian imagination and a material that fascinates the artist, who, alongside a master glassmaker in Switzerland, embraces it for his work. The blown and flat glass that he designs and colours is made in Basel.

 

In this exhibit, glass trees and celestial bodies form a monumental stained-glass window framing a space containing both the house and the clearing. Within, shadows dance and become light, bringing the place to life, beckoning us to daydream in this crystallised forest and to wonder about the place's history and memory in light of today's challenges.

 

Two paintings from a set of the artist's works belonging to the Collection are included in this in-situ creation.