French artist Fabrice Hyber will give a lecture titled “Art and Behaviors” at OCT Art in Nanshan District.

Being a renowned artist, Hyber works in a diverse number of media, effortlessly shifting between painting, sculpture, installation and video.

Hyber has suggested that his work explores “the enormous reservoir of the possible” via a deconstruction of language and communication. To this end he deploys a very wide range of media for the purpose of expanding the range of his creative practice, and uses deconstructed language in order to present the viewer with puzzles. He abjures the coherent, instantly understandable, text and the consistent oeuvre in favor of a proliferation that reflects the fundamentally nonlinear character of cognition, making his work an artform in the tradition of the surrealist object and stream of consciousness. It is more akin to James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” than it is to classic narrative, Dionysian rather than Apollonian.

On the other hand, some of Hyber’s projects look like exercises in visual language. His “Squared Football” is not especially bewildering. It is quite simply a functional object that is turned into an ideal form: a cube. His idealized, cubed soccer ball maps onto the horror of function that characterizes post-Duchampian fine art that rose into dominance in the international art world in the 1960s. Hyber ironically refers to such functionless objects as prototypes of working objects.

Another instance of connecting the previously unconnected is his work titled “Swing.” This is a playground swing with the addition of “two phallic protuberances on the seat, one hard, one soft.” The pedophilic connotations appear to escape the artist or the art world for that matter.

Time: 7:30-10 p.m., Sept. 19

Venue: OCT Art, 9011 Shennan Boulevard, Nanshan District (南山区深南大道9011号华·艺术沙龙)

Metro: Line 1 to OCT Station (华侨城站), Exit C(SD News)