The Antwerp-based visual artist and playwright Jan Fabre is an artistic phenomenon with many faces. He is an energetic performer who pushes the boundaries of theatrical permissibility. He is a dedicated graphic artist who uses insects, scarabs and bic drawings to create a universe that is teems with mystical references, metamorphoses and personifications.
Drifts, desires, beauty and mortality are recurring themes, both on stage and in his visual work. Fabre fantasizes, glorifies and displays, but behind the dazzling beauty always conceals another world, an animalistic and bloody underworld. The forms that figure in his work are often angels, warriors, skeletons and animals. They are messengers in disguise who emerge from the past to remind us of deterioration and decay, of blood and suffering, of the animal in man and the human in the animal. He calls himself a consilience artist because he always leaps forward in knowledge by linking fact-based theory and practice across disciplines. He looks for and sees connections between different disciplines and thereby gives new interpretations to the world of visual
art, theater and writing.