PARIS.- Galerie Nathalie Obadia is presenting Apocalyipstick, Fabrice Hyber's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, following Habiter la forêt in 2021. Awarded the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, the artist has been developing an ever-expanding oeuvre for over thirty years, in the image of a rhizome: a system of thought and interconnected forms, based on proliferation, transformation and plastic experimentation. While the Apocalypse - whether ecological, biological or nuclear - pervades contemporary discourse, Fabrice Hyber's work offers an unexpected flipside. Through a series of new paintings and ceramics, the artist explores this notion not as an inescapable end, but as a passage towards transformation, aiming to reveal, beyond the collapse, the promise of a rebirth in process.

"And when the first angel sounded the trumpet, there followed hail and fire, mingled with blood, and it was cast on the earth. And the third part of the earth was burnt up, and the third part of the trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up." ¹

What if, in truth, the Apocalypse was not an end, but a metamorphosis? A call to transform catastrophes into fertile narratives, to play with language to reveal what lies beneath the ashes, waiting to be reborn. This is the dynamic behind Fabrice Hyber's approach: like a researcher or botanist, he constantly takes notes, measures, calculates and annotates his works, in search of new discoveries. For the artist, the Apocalypse goes beyond the destruction, celebrating "what is reborn in a burnt forest, a dried-up patch of land or a downtrodden community: there are always lives that reappear, words that are reborn, behaviors that persist," he says.

Fabrice Hyber's attachment to nature - and to forests in particular - runs deep. Almost thirty years ago, the artist launched an ambitious project: to reforest 70 hectares around his studio in Vendée, an initiative that embodies his vision of nature as a space for regeneration. This dynamic permeates his entire universe, teeming with plants, mushrooms, sprawling roots and "tree-men" reaching for the sky. The organic bond between the cosmos and the earth is evident even in his ceramics, where we see a meteorite splitting the clouds, like an omen. Yet, beneath this apocalyptic tension, some forms remain latent - like "mushroom seeds" buried underground, ready to deploy themselves in the midst of the chaos. These dynamics, observed with an approach that is both scientific and poetic, are in every creative gesture, sketching out endless organic flows.

In this new corpus, featuring pastels, charcoal, oil paint and resin, lipstick makes a comeback - a material already present in his early works. It disrupts the artist's visual universe, contrasting manufactured culture with organic matter. Lipstick has marked Fabrice Hyber's career, from Le Mètre carré de rouge à lèvres (1981), his first painting, to Un mètre cube de beauté, a monumental installation presented at the Palais de Tokyo, in 2012-2013. Lipstick - and above all the gesture it implies - goes beyond its simple application. "I'd rather put it on a painting than on lips," he asserts. "I add something, a possibility, a behavior. An artwork is something extra." ²

In the very title of the exhibition Apocalyipstick, everything is already suggested: the chaos and the beauty, the collapse and the brilliance. This neologism incarnates the hybridities so dear to Fabrice Hyber, where play on meaning, linguistic deviations, underground connections and celestial ascents mingle. In this constantly changing world, materials speak for themselves: resin - like sap - binds elements and seals fractures. The application of lipstick becomes a prophetic gesture: it colors catastrophe and reveals "its joyous underside," according to the artist.

Confronted with global upheavals, contemporary art sometimes neglects its own creative power, losing itself, instead, in the spectacle of destruction to the detriment of invention³. Fabrice Hyber opts for a radically different path: Apocalyipstick offers a vision in which past, present and future are intertwined without hierarchy. In the image of John's Apocalypse (1: 8): "what is, what was, and what is to come," the artist crosses through different timelines, turning fossils and seeds into symbols of a germinating future. This cycle has its roots in a foundational act: Le Mètre carré de rouge à lèvres, his first painting. Returning to this material is not nostalgia, but a quest for the energy to begin again and again. Each work thus becomes a stratum, a palimpsest, an area of awakening, where collapse is never an end, but a ferment of metamorphosis.

----------------------
¹ The Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle, 8: 7, The Bible
² "Il est interdit de mourir" (It is forbidden to die), Fabrice Hyber interviewed by Thierry Laurent, Au même titre Editions 2003, p.30, cited in Bernard Marcadé's L'art c'est toutes les possibilités du monde (Art is all the possibilities in the world), Flammarion, 2009
³ Idea evoked by BRUN, Jeanne, "Apocalypse. Hier et demain: une grande révélation?" (Apocalypse. Yesterday and Tomorrow: a Great Revelation ?), France Culture, February 20, 2025