In the beginning it was a knuckle duster.
Brass knuckles, iron fist or even rosette, for its bread-like swellings.
From the times of the Nuragic warriors in Sardinia, passing through the Marseille and Parisian underworld, up
to the troops of the First World War and the street clashes between demonstrators and police, this feral fist

presupposes a close combat. With a double, an enemy, a master, an eidolon. But when the two horizons col-
lide, the angry essence of the brass knuckles can also crumble and reveal the imaginary.

John Mirabel is, so to speak, an «imaginalist» who works with the field of possibilities, from the invisible to the

visible and vice versa. His fist / bread are the amorphous states, the allusions and symmetries, the anthropo-
morphic imagination, the median spaces that differentiate and bring symbolic and real closer together. Mirabel

lets only the image speak – which is anything but harmless – treating his sculpture «like an old woman, perhaps

a fallen, derelict high-class prostitute» who escapes the codes with which we would like to interpret it. Provo-
cation, Dada game? Moreover. This is a distorted ready-made, created manually, cleared through customs,

which re-enchants the world. The knuckles, first armed and strengthened in the fist, become a symbol of the
not-yet-thought, of the not-yet-present.

John Mirabel (1988, France) is an artist / musician / curator who instinctively reacts to the idea, to intuition, jug-
gling relentlessly between guitar, bass, double bass, scientific research, installation and rarefied and tumultuous

experimental sounds, murmurs of other worlds and levitations.
Mirabel re-elaborates the form-concept of the brass knuckles starting from the multifaceted Belgian artist

Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens (1903-1971) who began his career as the author of crazy Dada composi-
tions; Mirabel adopts its strategy and then sets it aside in favor of more daring decisions.

Mesens is an irreverent blagueur through and through. Comme ils l’entendent, et comme nous l’entendons –

«as they would like» (a brass knuckles upside down, with the tips sticking into the living flesh) and «as we per-
ceive it» (the brass knuckles in all its maximum expression ) -, Mesens’ 1926 explicitly Dada work, is redrawn

on wood by Mirabel in the manner of an archive photo and framed by a thick layer of metal. From a simple
process of inversion, Mesens extracts a brutal message, which finds a place in the apparatuses of punk and
which is reinforced by the subversive poetry of the leader of Belgian Surrealism Paul Nougé. Mesens’ brass
knuckles are soured with Nougé’s verbal violence. “Notre bouche est pleine de sang. Nos oreilles bourdonnent
de sang. Nos yeux s’illuminent de sang. Si nous voyons, c’est la couleur de notre sang «(The silent syllables,
1990). The images and text combine to create a sense of threat and an intangible tension. As the epiphany of
a minor real, a marginal object changes its sign to swell with the uncanny, the upsetting.
The subversion of images, the eternal clandestine, the dangerousness of music, are all themes that lead back

to the shift that John Mirabel also implements. Re-enact a brass knuckle, deprived of its most trivial conno-
tations, and magnify it, accepting its considerable technical challenges. «Don’t think, look!» (Ludwig Wit-
tgenstein). He looks at the iron body, titanic like a primordial force, masterfully welded, which whirls suspended,

driving a disk ball engine; creature freed from its gravity, protean is projected in several directions, creating
hypnotic shadows, in the scenic distance of a shop window. The sculptural object loses its aggressiveness
and moves in slow-motion, to the rhythm of Phil Collins’ cruel ballad «In the Air Tonight», cut and slowed down
by the divine hip hop DJ Screw. It is as if you get lost in the last beat of an audio cassette played underwater
or in the depths of the earth, in the syncopated pulsation of a drum before it stops living. A new sense of time
is perceived (which is that of the exhibition and at the same time it is not) wrapped in a sensual, languid and
melancholy blanket. In the metallic embrace of a seductive hybrid object, I witness the sunset of a «naked»
diva, the mocking deception of a game queen, an erotic dance on the verge of decline. Using the world, using
shapes with a sense of beyond: Mirabel transforms, cuts out, decontextualizes Mesens. Fatal translation.
«Crying how bright» is a form of survival in titanium, not without mystery, a firefly image that resists in spite of
everything, right there where its marginalization and vocation to revolt are declared – the art historian Georges
Didi-Huberman would say. -, a ceremony that creates resonance axes hidden in the folds of the sublime.