By turns magician, anthropologist, teller of folktales, taxonomist of heteroclite bodies of knowledge, and brain specialist, Patrick van Caeckenbergh is a polymorphous figure, who, by radicalizing his own subjective position, inoculates contemporary art with the vitriol of his personal fictions, dissolving not only our received ideas and certitudes but the very habits of mind that produce them.

Although one could cite the tradition of Belgian Surrealism, along with Aesop’s fables and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Marcel Broodthaers’ symbolism, the classificatory obsessions of Georges Pérec, and Flaubert’s