Fabien Verschaere's Seven Days Hotel at Musée d'art contemporain, Lyon

Fabien Verschaere's exhibition 'Seven Days Hotel' at the Musée d'art contemporain in Lyon (February 16 – April 29, 2007) transforms the gallery into a fantastical hotel. The installation features a lobby covered with hybrid characters—fairies, imps, angels, clowns, ghosts, demons—intertwined and exchanging attributes. A continuous cascade of motifs floods the walls and a monitor screen, accompanied by a flashing red neon, a dizzying animated film, and obsessive music by Liquid Architecture. Visitors receive a key from a devilish receptionist to explore seven rooms, following the initiatory journey of a sick child alone in a hospital room, reflecting Verschaere's own childhood memories. The saturated, naive imagery recalls Art Brut, born from isolation. The hospital becomes a hotel—a place of transit, travel, encounters. Rooms feature fairies, stars, a monumental devil crowned with flames, a nightclub with DJs Mickey and Batman in a surreal room lined with bones and watches, and parodies of the Last Judgment and the Trinity. This 'hotel-brain' materializes a mental atmosphere traversed like a dream or nightmare.