The relation between humans and animals was once one of proximity, a shared world of glances, gestures, and unspoken recognition. With the rise of modern capitalism, this closeness has been progressively dismantled. Animals have been removed from everyday life and absorbed into systems of production, consumption, and display—transformed into commodities, spectacles, and images. In Why Look at Animals?, John Berger reflects on this transformation, describing a subtle but profound rupture: animals are no longer encountered as sentient counterparts but are instead objectified, managed, and consumed within an economic order that prioritizes efficiency and profit over relation.
In 'Un monde à part', the Belgian painter Sabrina Dufrasne opens a space that belongs first to the animals themselves, resisting this logic of commodification. Her paintings draw on the formal vocabulary of Etruscan tomb frescoes: flat planes of saturated colour, ornamental borders, and figures suspended in lateral movement. She appropriates this visual language to invert established hierarchies, allowing human figures to become animal-like, as in '¡Olé!' (2026), reminiscent of the Bull-Leaping Fresco at Knossos.
Animals and hybrid beings traverse the painted surfaces independently, while human figures—like the diver from the 'Tomba del tuffatore' at 'Mes petits canards d'amour' (2026)—appear only at the margins of this world. They are often caught in moments of exposure or danger, poised on the brink of being devoured or undone. Here, the human is no longer the organising center but a contingent presence within a domain that resists ownership and control.
Rendered in gesso on thick, aged linen—supports that retain traces of wear, fragility, and time—the works evoke fragments rather than complete scenes, like displaced frescoes or remnants of a symbolic order disrupted by modernity.
The animals in these works are neither decorative nor illustrative; they hold their ground. Their stylized gestures assert presence and agency, countering the passive roles assigned to animals within capitalist visual culture. Rather than staging animals as objects of human observation or consumption, Dufrasne’s paintings propose a world of their own—un monde à part—in which human and animal presences intersect without reconciliation. What emerges is a mode of looking that resists possession, attuned instead to distance, autonomy, and the persistence of forms that exist beyond the logic of capital.
