Gaude Succurrere Vitae is an exhibition that combines the drawings and films of Jan Fabre. Drawing is as essential to Fabre as breathing. He draws every day. Not just studies for his visual or his theatre work, but as an outlet for his unceasing flow of ideas.

In the course of art history the drawing has often been viewed as a sketch, a study, a preliminary to the actual work. This is not true in Fabre's case. He has emancipated the drawing. In this case the drawing is an autonomous work that occupies an entirely independent position in his oeuvre.* Sometimes the drawings are an exploration of ideas that will return in later works, but they are just as often reflections on earlier work or simply works of art in their own right. The themes of the drawings are also the same as we find throughout the entire oeuvre: the body as a laboratory, the beetle as warrior , metamorphosis, the dialogue between life and death.

In most cases the drawings are made in series. Fabre draws with a wide variety of materials: pencil, ballpoint and even body fluids such as tears, blood and sperm. In the latter case the body makes an explicit appearance in the drawings and makes them into more than two-dimensional objects. The link between the depiction and what is depicted becomes both closer and double at the same time. 'A drawing is a body with a nose and ears' to put it in the Jan Fabre's words. Fabre approaches the body and, more generally, human existence, as something dynamic, something that has to be opened up and must develop. This is actually what the title of the exhibition refers to: Gaude Succurrere Vitae, which means 'be glad to come to the aid of life'. This is precisely what the poetic depictions of Fabre's work do. This bodily link also appears in the performances in which particular drawings were done. In the series called My body, my blood, my landscape, Fabre taps his own blood and then draws with it. Or the drawings in the 'Ilad Of The Bic Art' series, for which Jan Fabre shut himself up for three days in a white room, with white furniture and a blue ballpoint pen. In this way, Fabre makes drawings into three-dimensional objects. They become sculptures, with a back and a front.

This exhibition also includes films made by Fabre. Filming is drawing with light. And that is exactly what most of his films look like. In Ik, Prometheus die zich van zijn eigen tekenmateriaal voorziet, a man strikes a match in total darkness and lets it burn down completely. In Zelfmoord? [Suicide] we see the young Jan Fabre playing Russian roulette. Again and again he put a pistol to his head. Just as in the drawings it is the movement that is highlighted. Repetition is also extremely important. After a time the repeated movement starts to accumulate meanings. Fabre sees repetition as visually structured visible time. In this way time itself becomes a reflecting surface.**

Gaude Succurrere Vitae took place at S.M.A.K. in Ghent in autumn 2002; the Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea GAMEC, Bergamo, 2003; Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona, 2003; and the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Lyon, 2004