TRANSFORMATIONS: First period
Régis Durand The painting of Kristof Everart has long been presented under the banner of recovery. For Everart, this term signified a work protocol that could be applied to diverse situations – a kind of general programme designed to produce objects specific to the architecture of a place and to the overall setting. This protocol sometimes appeared to be characterized by a certain form of indifference to what was to be recovered, something akin perhaps to what Jean-François Lyotard, in his time, designated by the word apathy (which does not of course carry the everyday meaning of lack of sensitivity or energy) (1). Recovering, like erasing, can, in certain conditions, describe a low-intensity action, but only in certain conditions. In Kristof Everart's case, while there was perhaps a degree of indifference towards what was to be recovered, there still remained a certain tension between a general principle and the place where it materialized, thus constituting the essentially performance-based character of each production. A recovering, in effect, involves an act. It can only be conceived in terms of a particular context. That which is to be recovered, the subjectile if you wish, is only one of the elements at work. To this must be added the general arrangement of the venue, the scale, lighting, etc. But, above all, as this is a performative and transformative act, it draws attention to its own materialization and its own mode of expression: the act of painting, the gestures involved, the ingredients, the way in which they are applied, their material substance, thickness, drippings, splashes…, etc. The recovery of the subject and of the subjectile might have led the artist to the threshold of a new gestuality were it not for what I would call, after Lyotard, a certain kind of apathy, i.e. the refusal of a sentimental or ideological mode of expression and turgidity. Should one conclude that we were confronted here with a sort of energy-related degree zero? Certainly not, since the artist, above and beyond what has just been said, was motivated by the intention to take his creative process to its limits in a certain form of radicality blending order and disorder, the freedom given to the materials and the precise organisation of the final arrangement. Kristof Everart talks of "compensation phenomena", appearing to suggest by this all the unformulated zone of desires, dreams and fantasies which are the subconscious driving forces behind his art. However, I feel that one can interpret this expression as more than a banal psychoanalytical generalisation. Compensation also occurs, in the creation of his work, between that which is recovered and that which recovers – an unending game of hide-and-show (which, let it be said in passing, also emphasizes the theatrical nature of Everart's work. By which I mean not a wordy staging of a story but an energisation of space and architecture (2)). Hence, the notion of recovery, while appearing to be associated with low intensities, nevertheless contains one or, rather, several energies which are hallmarks of modernity: the disjunction of concept and material, of the creative act and the space where it is inscribed. Kristof Everart claims to have moved on now to other things, beyond the more mechanical and restrictive associations contained in the term 'recovery'. However, quite apart from the fact that we have observed him to be the bearer of fertile tensions, this does not imply that we should relinquish what this term can still tell us about this painter's work. And to begin with, the echo or double that I never fail to perceive in him which is due to the fact that he gives substance to two meanings of the verb recover. One recovers one's health or a debt, which signifies that one recuperates that which is one's due, or that which is held to be the 'normal' condition of the human species. And 'recovery', while suggesting the dissimulation of that which is covered, also points to the return of that something, and this semantic ambivalence is on a par with what we were saying about the game of hide-and-show. Because what is recovered is not an original object. It is what returns after the event, once one has made the trip and once the transformation has been staged. One's perception of the painting is thus regenerated by the displacement and substitution performed by the process of recovery. It is not surprising therefore that the artist's current work bears precisely upon the question of displacements. It is as though certain ideas were winding their way through a hazy zone between knowing and not-knowing, between deliberate choices and intuitive decisions. In the exhibition presented here, that which is "recovered" (which one should henceforth term the "transformed") is itself subjected to a series of complex transformational operations. Without going into detail, one could say that, initially, we are in the presence of pictorial actions such as are part and parcel of the artist's vocabulary. These actions or painterly gestures are photographed and then scanned and modelised using analytical software designed to measure urban traffic flows (3), before being reinterpreted in paint by the artist. The detour via the computerised model was principally aimed to allow the artist to stand back from his own pictorial vocabulary but also, and above all, to highlight the energies he conveys as well as the impact of those energies and their "force of application". Just as urban flows translate into "ropes" and "knots" of varying intensity, so the painting when treated this way is seen to be charged with energies which the modelisation attempts to reveal. The aim is not, of course, to quantify these energies (this is not a scientific exercise) but to render them visible and to allow them to become an arena for further transformations. This process of transformation through the back-and-forth shuttle of paint/computer processing/ paint provides the artist with a new stage on which to work. On this stage the painterly gesture is distanced from itself and from the emotional and expressive charge that accompanies the traditional range of gestures. In a sense it has been "chilled" and distanciated. It has become, as it were, an "impact", by which is meant, in the artist's terminology, a coloured form of variable dimensions, more or less opaque or transparent, which can float in the space of the canvas or become slightly detached in order to create a sense of distance or overhang. This form is somewhat enigmatic. Is its function to hide something (as, for example, the coloured lozenge shapes in some of the paintings by John Baldessari which dissimulate the identity of the characters and turn them into anonymous beings)? This doesn't appear to be the case with Everart. Or could they be trick shapes or anamorphic ruses which need to be seen from a particular angle in order to be deciphered? This is not the case either. Rather, we are in presence here, more simply, of a condensation of time and space which burrows through the plane of the canvas whilst simultaneously producing a point of maximum density of occurrences. And it also features a mode of painting, both smooth and full, which stands in contrast to the drippings and more indeterminate forms in the background. The perception produced by a pictorial decision of this nature plays on the oppositions between transparency and opacity and figure and background. In these circumstances, the 'impacts' play the role of 'figures', that is to say, of pictorial events set against the continuous presence of the backdrop. This new spatial dimension is conveyed in even more explicit fashion by the 3-dimensional installation of the work on the ground, thus creating the impression that the painting is deployed in space. In this way, Kristof Everart reiterates one of the great temptations (and one of the great aporiae) of the painting medium, i.e. space as a mode of becoming, the ability to move into the 3-dimensional world of phenomena. However, the installation is not merely a volume-possessing 'translation' of the painting. It has its own logic and produces in the viewer a particular form of perception and physical experience of the work. At the same time, the installation on the ground and the painted canvases form a whole, a global installation, as it were, thus marking a major stride forward in the artist's creation. From the relatively simple act involved in recovery, he has now moved on to a clustering of complex questions which require the viewer to be alert and almost in a state of heightened vigilance. One can remain unaware of everything we have said above regarding the inception of these works and have no understanding of the mathematical abstractions alluded to. Nonetheless, the canvases and the installation retain a certain familiar connection with the instruments of knowing, independent of their purely plastic achievement. This connection, whether conscious or not and whether explicit or otherwise, with the tools of knowledge of their time (and more generally speaking with what Michel Foucault called its episteme) is a regular feature of the work of all artists, as has often been demonstrated.As artists belong to the general sphere of knowledge (which they frequently anticipate), they place us very precisely in a familiar and yet constantly forgotten or repressed situation, namely, the feeling that we are surrounded by powerful networks of signs, systems and exchanges. The idea is not to remain locked within a slightly paranoid vision of a world entirely fenced in by networks of this kind that only a select few are able to decode. But neither should we deliberately ignore an essential feature of our world and the perception that we have of it as an inextricable knot or as a series of superimposed strata of codes and flows. Nowadays, a 'landscape' is just that, a palimpsest of ancient forms (drawn essentially from literature and painting) and of others which are contemporary, abstract, enigmatic and yet charged with meaning. The artist attempts to provide us with an image of such forms, an image which is then superimposed upon the others, thus opening up a space of both understanding and of doubt.
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