Meessen De Clercq is pleased to present Solipsism, the fifth solo exhibition of Fabrice Samyn. Through new works in four groups, Fabrice Samyn places the visitor in a position where he no longer distinguishes between what perceives (his eye, his sight, his reflection) and what is perceived.

In the room on the right, 'The Twilight of Idols' brings together works that have been magnified by their destruction and destroyed by their 'magnification'. On the one hand, Burning is shining, a series of solid wood panels gilded with gold leaf and then burned, opens up the question of the power of icons and iconoclasm. On the other hand, Black is Virgin is a set of nine charred and sap-covered virgins. In a paradoxical movement of covering and glorification, these works refer as much to the pre-Christian cults of the goddess of fertility as to the mysterious phenomena that manifest themselves in all religions.

In the left-hand room, three works have their origin in the notion of the psyche, both in the symbolic sense of the Greek origins of the word (metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly) and in the sense of the contemporary derivative word 'psyche'. These works are part of a general reflection by the artist on time and the passage from one state to another. Allusions to ancient still lifes or representations of the passage to the afterlife are spectacularly evident in the silver glass recumbent entitled Death is an image.

With The Colour of time, in the back room, Fabrice Samyn delivers a work full of nuances composed of twelve solid glass globes in the colours of the different hours of the day. From dawn to dusk. A celestial evocation, this work questions, in a subtle gradation, the fullness of emptiness and the emptiness of fullness under the solar eye of a watercolour facing it.

Finally, in the lower room, a fourth body of work questions the sphere of the gaze and illustrates the performative aspect present in the artist's practice. One example is Blind piece 1, a work resulting from an encounter between a blind woman and the artist. The artist sculpted her face without ever seeing her. He only became aware of the relief of his model's face by touching her through a curtain that separated them from each other.

Ultimately, this exhibition revolves around time and its territories; the four groups of works are based on the temporal dimension of the sacred and the profane, the evanescent and the fleeting, the luminous and the concealed, the intimate and the distant.