PARIS.- Over the past forty years, Fabrice Hyber has sown some 300,000 tree seeds in the valley next to his family's farm in Vendée, gradually transforming the fields into a forest and the landscape into a work of art. It is in this valley, a veritable open-air laboratory, that the artist draws his inspiration. His prolific work - more than 20,000 creations, including nearly 3,000 paintings - incorporates into the field of art all areas of life, from mathematics to neuroscience, economics, astrophysics, but also love, the body and the mutations of the living: "Art is all the possibilities of the world," he says.
As the starting point of all ideas, containing the seeds of all current and future works, painting occupies a primordial place in Fabrice Hyber's art. On large-format canvases, veritable notebooks on a human scale, Hyber puts down words, draws images, glues objects together, invents forms, formulates hypotheses and associates ideas. Like a blackboard, each canvas offers an image of his thoughts in motion, illustrating the artist's fascination with the transformation of the world.
Like so many classrooms in an ideal school, the fifty paintings brought together for the exhibition open up spaces in which each person is free to let his or her thoughts wander, to slide his or her gaze, and to reinvent, ad infinitum, the possibilities of reality.
Fabrice Hyber, born in Vendée in 1961, studied mathematics before entering the École des beaux-arts in Nantes. Starting invariably from the practice of drawing and painting, he invests all modes of expression. As an artist-entrepreneur, he created Unlimited Responsibility (UR) in 1994, a limited liability company designed to promote the production and exchange of projects between artists and entrepreneurs. In 1997, he was awarded the Golden Lion for the television studio project for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale and has carried out numerous commissions, including the monumental work L'Artère - Le Jardin des dessins, in the Parc de la Villette, dedicated to the memory of AIDS victims and completed in 2006.
Transmission is at the heart of the work of this artist, who taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 2002 to 2005 and for whom "art is the only way to learn about the world by making disciplines interact".
After creating Les Réalisateurs programme, run in collaboration with art and business schools, he is now launching various training courses mixing disciplines in Pantin as part of Hyber-fabrique, in Montrouge (Les Jardiniers), in Villefranche-sur-Mer and, of course, in the Vendée region, where he has created his foundation. Fabrice Hyber was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2018, and in 2021 was appointed ambassador of the ONF-Agir pour la forêt fund.
