Belgium’s contemporary comic artists: Brecht Evens
Belgian comics are famous worldwide thanks to giants from the past like Hergé and Franquin, but many local artists have followed in their footsteps. In this series, Belga English draws the profiles of four contemporary Dutch-speaking comic artists and graphic novelists with international appeal. Today: the eccentric, exciting universe of Brecht Evens.
Brecht Evens is the latest winner of the Bronzen Adhemar, the Flemish oeuvre prize for comics, which he received last year while still in his 30s. The jury praised him for not only raising the Flemish comic strip to an art form, but also excelling internationally.
He has collected various nominations for the prestigious American Eisner Award and his works have been translated into numerous languages.
Hasselt-born Evens, who has lived in Paris for more than 10 years, broke through in 2009 with the graphic novel Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (The Wrong Place), which he started as his final thesis project. In it, he applies his now well-known free-flowing drawing technique – watercolour without contouring strokes – to create a extraordinary atmosphere with an impressive palette of colours and unconventional stylistic language.
In the inventive book, the characters do not express themselves in speech bubbles but speak in their own font colour. The Wrong Place painfully demonstrates how awkward social gatherings can be and deals with the difficulty of making meaningful contact with others.
Evens would return to the nocturnal universe of The Wrong Place in 2018 in Les Rigoles (The City of Belgium), in which three friends are confronted with an intoxicating cocktail of alcohol, drugs, fear and desire while exploring the urban nightlife.
He overwhelms readers with stunning street scenes, interiors with experimental perspectives and intertextual references to Noah’s Ark and others.
Unsettling trip
In between these two graphic novels, he published De liefhebbers (The Making Of) and Panter (Panther).
The first, a parody of the sensitivities in the art world, tells the story of an artist who travels to a provincial town as a star guest at a festival. Panther is a haunting graphic novel about a little girl and her imaginary feline companion. Subtly, using dynamic watercolours, Evens takes readers on an unsettling trip to the dark depths of the human psyche and hints at the subject of child abuse.
"I thought everything was a stage set to test me, a megalomaniacal illusion full of interpretative delusions in which everything was coded, especially for me"
The protagonist of Evens’ most recent book, De bondgenoten (The Jellyfish King), is also a child: a young boy, Arthur, who receives a spartan training from his paranoid father. The father prepares him for the battle between good and evil which supposedly will kick off very soon, and they gradually isolate themselves from the rest of the world.
The father believes they have “allies”, but they need to find them. When his father disappears, Arthur has to fend for himself. For the first time in his oeuvre, Evens will come up with a sequel.
Manic period
In interviews, Evens has said that both The City of Belgium and The Jellyfish King are inspired by a psychotic episode he experienced more than 10 years ago, caused by depression and drug use. While he translated this manic period into a wild party night in The City of Belgium, another side of that mental breakdown emerges in his latest work.
“During that period, I thought everything was a stage set to test me, a megalomaniacal illusion full of interpretative delusions in which everything was coded, especially for me,” he explained to De Tijd.
Apart from his books, Evens also creates murals, like his Brussels Bloemenhof mural (Flower Garden, 2018). And in 2016 he produced a Travel Book for the Louis Vuitton Foundation with 100 drawings of Paris.
#FlandersNewsService | Brecht Evens wins the Special Jury Prize at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, France, in 2019 © PHOTO YOHAN BONNET / AFP
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