History of Fantasy at Everyday Gallery

‘History of Fantasy’ is a phantasmagorical stroll populated by ghosts, animated by a poisonous magic. It is part of the wake of a new twilight wave, a reminiscence of an underlying current that has been running through history since the end of the eighteenth century, summoning up the successive avatars of the Romantic matrix, from the neo-Gothic to the dark wave and fantasy, via the troubadour style and fin de siècle symbolism.

1 Historical wanderings

‘History of Fantasy’ is a historical wandering filled with memories, fantasies and recreations. Far from being considered as a uniform block, this history is the fruit of memories and absences. These historical fantasies are like escapes from the times, projecting us into other temporal dimensions, where history becomes a world in itself. The works exhibited and produced for ’History of Fantasy’ explore these historical and memorial reminiscences. The inaccuracies left by the passage of time, counterbalanced by visual persistence, around motifs or forms that have entered the collective unconscious (the gothic arch, the recumbent, and other ornaments…) are sources of creation, reinvention and variation. These historical and artistic recollections are summoned by the artists in the historical walk of ‘History of Fantasy’. Notably through Laure Prouvost’s woven work, representing a stele, or through Bella Hunt & Ddc’s Celtic-Atlantean recumbent representing an ancient warrior woman, a veritable reinvention a posteriori, or Jenna Käes’ Valkyrie shrouds. These works conjure up a historical fantasy that translates into creations and formal variations, in the manner of the literary style of heroic fantasy, such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, heir to the ancient and medieval epic narrative. It is unclear whether the works of Bella Hunt & Ddc or the quasi-Parthe horse of Jean-Marie Appriou are works from forgotten civilizations or new icons of an imaginary world. The exhibition creates correspondences and tributes to the gothic and baroque architecture of Flanders, a real point of friction between the influences of northern and southern Europe and the Germanic area, from which a form of artistic fusion emerges that can be found in all the artists of ‘History of Fantasy’.

2 Dark Wave and Kunstwollen

‘History of Fantasy’ is part of this fundamental movement linked to dark romanticism and the gothic novel, born in the eighteenth century, from the rupture of the French Revolution followed by the industrial revolution, and extending at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the whole of Europe. History becomes the space of all fantasies in counterpoint to the eternal present. Admiration for the ancient grandeur of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century already functioned as a revival; the fantasy of the past became a medium of creation. From the 1770s onwards, this calm and positive relationship with the past changed, and was no longer just a source of knowledge and inspiration. History became a refuge from the accelerating and sometimes brutal changes of modern Western societies. The upheavals of the late eighteenth century led to the emergence of a heritage consciousness and a new relationship with time, where the present is now thought of independently of the past. The Restoration and the creation of History as a discipline detached from literature and philosophy led to a renewed interest in the Middle Ages and in Gothic architecture. This gave rise to the neo-Gothic, the troubadour style and the Pre-Raphaelite group. These are not purely historicist movements; they are above all creations based on a fantasised vision (see the reconstructions of Viollet-le-Duc, the objets d’art of Félicie de Fauveau) of an admired past. This attraction to the past as a source of inspiration continued beyond the nineteenth century through the neo-Romanesque, neo-Byzantine movements, in the neo-classicism of the 1930s and even in the egyptomania of the 1920s. In the 20th century, in the post-war years and particularly from the 1970s-1980s, this underground current emerges again, embodied in a kind of “dark wave”, a wave of historical fantasy as a counterpoint to the historical repression induced by the modern flight forward, then by the permanent post-modern present. Fantasy literature, in the wake of Tolkien from the 1950s onwards, medieval-fantasy role-playing games in the 1960s, and the new wave and neo-romantic current in the 1980s all appear as pure inventions built on historical reminiscences and reinterpretations, and are uchronic and alter-historical productions and fantasies. This leitmotif of historical fantasy is a manifestation of Alois Riegl’s kunstwollen – the artistic will – which ‘History of Fantasy’ proposes to identify and analyse. This need for artists to look at history and the past is thus born of the weight of the permanent present and of the forgetting and deformations that the passage of time entails, eroding memory as the passage of water erodes rock. The alluvium, however, transported by the water, ends up aggregating again to form sedimentary layers.