Jan Fabre - the Louvre - Paris

Through July 2008

A subtle sense of disjuncture between the Louvre's claims of fundamentally changing its exhibition approach, and its actual practices, pervades contemporary Belgian artist Jan Fabre's exhibition 'The Angel of Metamorphosis'. Hosted as part of the museum's 'Counterpoints' contemporary art program -- which has welcomed artists Candida Höfer, Mike Kelley, Sarkis, and Anish Kapoor since 2003 -- Fabre has taken up residence in the Louvre's less-visited Northern School galleries.

The positioning of contemporary art in the Louvre is meant, of course, to provide new ways of apprehending the existing collection -- and in some sense, it's impossible not to have a changed experience of the museum when the artworks themselves are different. The real question is whether or not this 'update' for the 21st century is more than skin deep. Does the mere presence of contemporary art in the Louvre radically alter the fundamental make-up of this venerable microcosm (enabling it to attract a truly different audience for truly different reasons, as the museum hopes)? Do Jan Fabre's installations really challenge the Louvre's established viewing standards to provoke new 'ways of looking'?

For now, the answer to both of these questions is no. Fabre's theatrical works are strictly in line with the aesthetic mood and macabre thematics of Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van der Weyden, and Bosch -- sometimes to the point of simply acting as three-dimensional 'transliterations' of surrounding paintings. Not unlike the audio-tours provided for visitors as substitutes for more traditional wall-texts, this is an old lesson in a new form.

Fabre's own visual vocabulary combines a whiff of religious kitsch with the mustiness of the natural history museum, a fantastical mélange whose rich textures and hues and heavy iconography echo neighboring 15th and 16th-century works. The here-and-now visual pleasure of scaly coffins covered in emerald scarabs, gilded lambs in glass cases, tumbled heaps of tombstones, and entomological sketches draws viewers back for a second look at the related, yet perhaps less immediately arresting, paintings. In some pieces, Fabre gets carried away with the mystical weirdness of it all. Works like Votive Offering to the God Of Insomnia (2008) -- where bulbous, unidentifiable objects are covered in false eyeballs -- seem designed to counter their decorous installation behind velvet ropes or on sculptural bases, but one wishes Fabre would simply take them out of their cases and let them be as strange as they are.

(Read the full-length version at Whitehot magazine).