Brecht Evens on exhibit in Belgium

by Wim Lockefeer

Even though he has delighted international audiences for more than a decade now with colorful graphic novels like The Wrong Place, The Making Of, and most recently, The City Of Belgium, Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens never had a sizable solo exhibition of his work before. It is only fitting that his hometown of Hasselt, a version of which plays an important part in The City of Belgium, is filling that gap with not one but two shows, running until October 16, 2021.

I visited both exhibitions on a sunny Sunday afternoon in early September, after battling my way through the remnants of the Belgian COVID safety measures for cultural events. They are very intimate affairs in older houses on both ends of the admittedly fairly small city, some 15 minutes apart.

The first one, in the Stadsmus (or city museum), focuses on Evens as a fine artist. The show contains pages from Evens’ graphic novels that also work as stand-alone works, as well as free works and design assignments for various outlets. Rather than opting for the more obvious chronological order, the curators have opted for a more subtle thematic setup, which allows images from various books an various moments in Evens’ career to be presented next to one another, illustrating recurring elements but also a clear evolution.

At one point in the accompanying video interview, Evens acknowledges that, even though dialogue is necessary in comics, a picture in itself can quite often tell more than it would seem to at first glance. It’s a tribute to his mastery that the pages from his various graphic novels not only also function as an aesthetic visual work of art, but indeed seem to tell a story, even when words are absent.

Visually, Evens has evolved into an ever more detailed, miniaturist style, adorning his characters with fanciful clothing and headdress, which he then has to repeat ad infinitum with never ceasing application and care, as in a meditation routine. Which is not to say that the overlapping watercolors from his earlier books are completely gone. The few pieces from his 2016 Louis Vuitton travel book on Paris quite surprisingly seem to reduce the vistas of the city to abstract forms in subdued pastels without really clear delineation. 

The piece de résistance in the show, however, is the huge mappemonde musicale that Evens created during lockdown for the Philharmonie de Paris. It measures roughly 5,5 by 1,5 meters (so huge that they had to fit it sideways in the room, and it is basically a map of the world, filled with all kinds of amazing musical instruments, real or imagined, along with strange fauna, people, boats and plants.

Even though the second part of the exhibition, in the quite cozy Villa Verbeelding, also shows a number of visually stunning pages from Evens’ books, the focus is here on his creative process, on what comes before the indeed brilliant and pristine art on the final page. On the tables and in the display cases we see sketchbooks, page layouts and dialogue drafts, but also color swatches and watercolor trial mixes that all lead to the final page.

The numerous character sketches indeed show that characters (“personnages”) provide the necessary spark to get Evens’ creative talent rolling. Starting from an initial quick sketch, a personal impression or an overheard snippet of dialogue, Evens will elaborate a journey that centers around very particular people, more often than not in the colorful and loud parties on the seedier side of town. 

Judging from the numerous preparatory pieces for any particular page, it is no wonder that Evens is able to keep his final product clean and clear, without so much as a quick pencil outline, albeit with a style that ranges from the minute details of a Medieval miniaturist to the broad swatches of an impressionist painting. That later side becomes especially apparent in the more improvised pieces in the exhibit, and more particularly in the wall-long story scroll Evens created during a 24-hour comics session in Ghent.

We can go wherever is an impressive showcase for the sheer talent that Brecht Evens has been able to tap into and develop over the past decade, and it also sets the stage for what’s to come. For Evens is not done yet – about his new book he says: “Since it turns out to be hard, doing this new book, it must be that I’m still learning new skills, still improving."

The exhibition “We can go wherever” runs at the Stadsmus and Villa Verbeelding in Hasselt from June 12 until October 16, 2021. More info here (in Dutch). Books by Brecht Evens are available in English from Drawn & Quarterly.