The work of Eva Evrard is not easy to access. From the outset, by the predominance of its whiteness, by the rigor of its form, by its stripped architectures, it puts the one who looks at a distance. It intimates rather than demands one to be silent. And if one accepts to denude oneself, if one accepts to be as vulnerable and fragile as the work itself, then it reveals a deep complexity, that of the body—at once social, political, sexual—that of the absence of this body, of thought, of life; that also of the struggle of this body to exist, against all odds, to express its singularity, to avoid disappearance.
Under the wise and fragile appearance of the paper, under the fine handwriting and precise gestures, this is what is going on. A permanent conflict, and yet so minimalist that it becomes almost invisible; an unheard-of violence, and yet almost inaudible, like all those open mouths, fixed in the walls, and of which not a sound, not a word, springs forth. What is played out in each work, and by a subtle correspondence between them, is the contemporary history of our world, and the fate of human bodies caught in its cogwheels; it is the existential threat of a possible and total disappearance; it is to become traces, fossilized bones, hermetic monuments of a lost humanity, reproduced on scale.
To understand this work, its relation to the book as object and its formal polysemy, we must go back, in the crucible of the twentieth century where began, almost mirroring one another, two major artistic currents, particularly in the 1960s and 70s: on the one hand, the development of American conceptual art from John Barry to Lawrence Weiner, and its fascination with the printed word, process and negative space; and on the other hand, the renewal of the Arts & Crafts movement which, with artists like Louise Bourgeois, recycled arts practices considered as minor at the time (weaving, ceramics, etc.) to develop a critical aesthetic proposal.
Hadelin Feront