Fabián Schalekamp - “The Heart of the Forest”

The work that Fabián Schalekamp (Palma, 1964) has been quietly developing for years is an example of rigor and coherence in the context of Balearic visual arts.

Born into a family of intellectuals—his father, Jean Schalekamp, was a renowned writer, and his mother, Muriel D. Hess, a visual artist—he was raised with principles of respect for nature that, over time, have become the backbone of a body of work spanning sculpture, drawing, photography, intervention, installation, and environment, and which has always been reluctant to exhibit, undoubtedly convinced that the sole reason for a piece’s existence was its connection to the environment and that any other argument beyond this principle was accessory and therefore dispensable.

“When I enter the forest I don’t hear the birds, but the beating of the roots. Beneath my feet stretches an invisible network that shares water, nutrients, and memory. Nothing lives alone. The forest exists because each of its elements supports the others in a silent and persistent balance,” Schalekamp tells us, and branch by branch he forms an imaginary forest—a evocation of the inner forest that we all carry within us.