The temptations of Patrick Everaert

by Pierre-Olivier Rollin

First of all let us resist a particularly evident and strong temptation which is to begin a piece about Patrick Everaert with a literary quotation taken from one of the writers who constitute his main references, not just in his artistic work but most probably in his day-to-day life as well. Literature does indeed play an important role in his work, but limiting its importance to the artistic sphere alone would mean underestimating the artist’s ongoing preoccupations. There is no question of elaborating on this particular aspect here; we just need to keep in mind that his work is inspired more by our everyday world than by these autonomous stories which the arts have been able to create. We will have to come back to this.

Patrick Everaert’s reflection is actually fuelled by literary experimentation: Joyce, Swift, Sterne, Walser and all the writers who have upset classical narrative codes to crystallise their development, and indeed suppress this progression by condensing it. Patrick Everaert retains fiction and narration from this change in literary direction, both of which appear at the heart of his work process. Narration because it involves the spectator for as long as it lasts, crystallised here to the point of immobilisation. “My works requires time,” he makes clear from force of habit in the interview, before adding: “in different respects.” Time is an essential notion in his work, as much for realising his works over a slow period of maturation, rather than it being a matter of trial and error, as for their future appreciation. It is a courageous demand to make today, more a form of resistance to the order of speed than the artist’s pride.

 And then fiction, because it allows the creation of singular universes which shed light on our world and which “contradict it, if only a little bit”, as the artist has to repeat again, paraphrasing Witold Gombrowicz, one of the references to whom he is partial. “I like to imagine myself as a creator of worlds”, he conceded to Bernard Lamarche-Vadel[1], “a very modest successor to moralists like Jonathan Swift and Samuel Butler who shed light on the society of their time and on human nature in a sometimes cold and harsh light by creating fantastical worlds. ” That being the case, literature cannot be seen as a “source of inspiration” - Patrick Everaert’s art is the very opposite of illustration: it is more a form of comprehension of the world.

 If at this stage Patrick Everaert uses fiction in a roundabout way, it is less to pour out his feelings about the pleasure it generates – although this does happen – than in order to use it to stimulate a consciousness intellectually which is meant to be active. It is an area of huge freedom and for him fiction works to provide a maximum distancing from reality, a deliberate distraction removed from apparent solutions, a voluntary perdition outside all genuine points of reference. Therefore impossible twists and turns that he orders of it conversely offer up potential paths towards an intuitive comprehension of the world, as if it were necessary to refuse a direct exploration of it in order to experience, even in part, its very substance. It is one of the paradoxes already identified by this unusual visual artist: he always shows least what he develops most intensively[2]. What can be more normal: Patrick Everaert rejects all obviousness or easiness, opting for the least predictable solutions, knowingly misleading people he is communicating with and even giving himself on occasions – supremely cocking a snook at a cold and cerebral description of his work – the inadmissible pleasure of pleasing himself.

Let us resist a second temptation which is to consider Patrick Everaert’s work as photography. To this end, it is first advisable to linger over his work process which starts with collecting images from illustrated magazines, books and the vast body of work that constitutes the Internet; that is to say this universe that Italo Calvino called ’indirect imagination”. For preference, his choices are concentrated on publications or sites whose language he does not know in order to overshadow the semantic context in which the image is used. Then, after storing the image in his memory and then retrieving it again some years later, Everaert subjects it to a whole range of manipulations, initially technical ones and now,  today, computerised ones, without this displacement involving an ethical modification of his intention, even if Bernard Lamarche-Vadel identified a fundamental ideological shift in it. The work is then printed onto photographic paper in a (framed) “picture” format before being mounted onto aluminium.

These lengthy manipulations turn Patrick Everaert’s images into works of an ambiguous status. They do not depend on this “photographic act” as a comprehension of the final result might make you believe. Furthermore the artist deliberately exploits the tension created by the veracity of this form of media, with which indexed images are excessively loaded, and by the complexity and indeed impossibility of the situations set up by him. He offers a critical warning whose pertinence is measured all the time in everyday life. If we call up the history of photomontage, we first have to admit that Everaert refuses to give in to the brutality of what Dominique Baqué called “ the aesthetics of fragment and shock” in order to describe surrealist or dadaist practices; just as he makes use of the aesthetic extremes of the emotional or provocative excess permitted nowadays by the new technology around digital image processing which some contemporary photography is full of. More fundamentally, Renaud Huberlant has discovered very accurately that “Patrick Everaert is nothing like a photographer and so does not refer at all to the history of this medium nor to an isthmus of any of the others […]”. Consequently his figurative language “liberates him from the historical referent of photography.”[3]  

Let us resist a third temptation, perhaps the greatest one, which is to seize on Patrick Everaert’s works as if they are paintings. The technical style of painting is certainly evoked at times, even in its most classical expressions: the semantic qualification of colours, obscuring or revealing by superimposing layers, the effects of transparency or glaze, specific distortions of spatial constructs etc. A recent series of small works even contrasts colour and line in a very historical way, under the common title of “painting-drawing”, using framing, protective glass and passe-partout. And sometimes, when a pornographic image is veiled in black, it is very old formal processes, like hypomorphism or hypermorphism, that expose the paradigm of his work: the discrete conjunction, in a single work, of the most opposite principles of image, ostentation and obscuring.

A paradoxical contraction of a picture’s most remote possibilities (revealing and hiding), these works bring about an age-old discourse on representation and what is at stake. Occasionally mentioned is the figure of Magritte who resolved the visual aporia that he was constructing in the quality of their painted image; surrealism can feature amongst prisms of comprehension in Everaert’s work, but it would certainly be simplistic and would not take centuries of representation into account. In one text, the artist explained his intention, starting with three stages of perception that Joyce borrows from St Thomas Aquinas (completeness, harmony and luminosity); but one could use other age-old references which do not rest until all possible meanings of multiple forms of representation have been explored. Without entering into a philosophy of image, let us recognise that the implications of Patrick Everaert’s works largely exceed what we content ourselves with seeing.  

Painting then? No. Not more, not less than photography, photomontage, collage, visual literature or any other term that is pleases us to give it. For again, that option would be too simplistic. The references made in this short contribution have in common an emphasis of the qualities of their disciplines, less to mark them out in a dogmatic way than to accentuate them. The use of certain pictorial techniques never affects, for example, the immediate photographic qualities of Patrick Everaert’s works; on the contrary, one is fuelled by the other. Refusing any proximity between them and classical photography comes back to depriving them of this fertile encounter which generates their statutory ambiguity. Furthermore Patrick Everaert has never sought to “do painting” as others have been able to do, for what at times are very base motives. And I bet that, like Duchamp, he detests the smell of turpentine just as he must loath the myth of the artist in his studio.

After these three temptations, let us finally concede that Patrick Everaert’s work cannot be contained within one of these very practical definitions in order to confine a reality that escapes us. It is delicious failure that Stéphane Corréard called “the pleasure of not understanding”[4] and which conversely emphasises the efficiency of a work that endeavours to conserve an inviolable core, a “terra incognita” which resists comprehension and keeps its power of questioning alive. A work which obliges perception to be continually reformulated, thought to be moved into increasingly vast semantic fields, imagination to generate intermingled stories until this endless postponement of intimate revelation makes you giddy. Patrick Everaert then refers to Laurence Sterne : “Conscious that the shortest path between birth and death is a straight line, he created the most lucidly advanced character in the history of literature: Tristram Shandy, who even in his mother’s womb refuses to be born because he doesn’t want to die. ”

Ultimately this last quotation refers back to the only exhibition of Patrick Everaert’s work to be given a title, an extremely rare concession made by his work to the written word: Tuer le temps [Killing Time]. “What I’m trying to do, he conceded at the time, is eternally defer the moment when the image is going to reveal itself, give itself and define itself. What can be defined is finished (dead). By attempting to produce the undefined, I am trying to stretch out towards infinity. This brings us to the title of the exhibition. In Tuer le temps, in this authoritarian time which goes by and inexorably catches us up, we should of course read “killing death”. The ultimate utopia which motivates my work”. If, when all is said and done beneath the many and diverse strata of Patrick Everaert’s works, death is in fact continuously pointing to a very human preoccupation, and perhaps too much so, it is not about giving way to it and despairing about a world saturated in images but deprived of substance. This inversion has not escaped Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, a person in true despair, who sensed a “secret enthusiasm” lurking in Patrick Everaert’s works. And so they appear to be more an exhortation to live through each circumlocution and crystallisation of existence, to the point of embracing its totality and dying from it, because you have to, but through excess. This is the ultimate temptation.

[1]Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, “Un Fond de vérité. Entretien.” [A heart of truth. Interview], in Patrick Everaert, Paris, Galerie Météo, 1995.

[2] Pierre-Olivier Rollin, “Patrick Everaert. L’hybride radical comme principe primordial” [The radical hybrid as primordial principle], in Dits, n°2, 2003.

[3] Renaud Huberlant, “Digressions sur l’éclipse de l’art” [Digressions on the overshadowing of art], in Patrick Everaert. Tuer le temps, Charleroi, B.P.S. 22, 2002

[4] Corréard Stéphane, “Le Plaisir de ne pas comprendre”[The pleasure of not understanding], in Patrick Everaert. Tuer le temps, Charleroi, B.P.S. 22, 2002