Patrick Everaert

Patrick Everaert creates photographic prints from magazine images which are then reworked on a computer. Although his work seems to concretise visual impossibilities that René Magritte would have approved of, surrealism is not the only reference present in the work of Patrick Everaert. Literature and particularly authors who destroyed the rules of narrative construction, cinema, art history, photography and also semiology and psychoanalysis are all equally important prisms to understand his work.

The very basic of Patrick Everaert’s work is to modify the reading of the initial image to lead it to a balancing point where it could tip over in many different directions. He works as a painter, even if that doesn’t appear. He wants to discover, through ‘pictorial’ interventions how he can affect the meaning that each image can produce. Like a painter, he works with a series of layers, or by little touches to integrate two images (or more) into each other so that the boundaries blend into each other in a way that isn’t visible.

Hybridisation is at the centre of Everaert’s work. In many of his pieces you can find mixed up bodies, superimposed, which produce persons that by nature have never existed. He wants to suggest to the viewers that they produce interpretations that are specific to them. As he says “A work, in my view, has to resist the fact that it is quickly looked at, quickly read, and often quickly forgotten. I also think that the role of an artist is to ask questions, to confront the spectators with doubt. Yet there is nothing worse than eliminating doubt because then we find ourselves with a juxtaposition of certitudes or even worse, revealed ‘Truths’ as we can see it today in the inflation of religious extremisms. As an artist I think it’s my duty to offer things which are intriguing, disturbing, different.”