arts review

From Street Murals to Graphic Novels: Brecht Evens’ Artistic Odyssey

Monochrome characters and Escher-type lizards populate the gouaches of Flemish comic book artist Brecht Evens. His sophisticated style has earned him the Bronzen Adhemar, a prize that already ranks him, despite being only thirty-something, among the greats of comic books in the Low Countries.

Even those who have never heard of Brecht Evens (Hasselt, 1986) may have already, unwittingly, been struck by his intense style. He has designed several large street art projects in Antwerp, Brussels and Knokke-Heist. The most recent, Heist-Carnaval (2022), could with its frenetic composition have come straight out of one of his graphic novels. The Brussels Bloemenhof mural (Flower Garden, 2018) in the Grootsermentstraat, has a much calmer vibe. The oldest fresco, Bruiloft (Wedding, 2012-2022), which decorates the Oever Street in Antwerp, was more evocative of Heist-Carnaval. Unfortunately, the construction of apartments led to that work being demolished two years ago. On the bright side, twenty fragments did find new homes via an auction.

Considering that Evens’ first album only appeared seven years prior to the first mural – and was done in a completely different style – we can only conclude that his rise has been meteoric. And his star is still rising: the very fact that someone in his thirties has won the prestigious Bronzen Adhemar is an exceptional honour – after all, it is an oeuvre award and he is still relatively young. Anyone who follows the graphic medium in Flanders will recognise his work from The Wrong Place, 2009), but his older work also demands attention.

A research task for the reader

After finishing his studies in Illustration at Sint-Lucas in Ghent and getting his early work published in comic magazines, Evens published Boodschap uit de ruimte (A Message from Space, 2005, Van Halewyck). The title was a scatological play on words. His playfulness is a hallmark of his style but this first, independent effort was far removed from what we know of him now. In terms of medium, technique and form, the album leans more strongly towards the recognizable style of the Franco-Belgian comic book. In a fairly traditionally uniform waffle pattern, we read the almost wordless account of a short earthly visit by a green space creature. Both (former) U.S. president Bush Jr. and Vladimir Putin also play – rather unflattering – roles. After 32 pages, the story ends with a mysterious cliffhanger: the only thing missing is the note ‘to be continued’. Yet no sequel to Boodschap uit de ruimte has ever been published.

A more serious publication, Vincent (2006) followed a year later, this time with the Leuven-based Oogachtend Publishing, which has since brought out all of Evens’ Dutch-language work. The hero of the title is a socially awkward fellow, a type we encounter regularly in Evens’ more mature work. In the Evens universe, our hero is deemed a loser simply due to comparisons with his childhood friend Jimmy, his polar opposite in many ways, who will undoubtedly make it in life – and who threatens to steal Vincent’s secret love.

Night Animals: A Diptych About What’s Rustling Through the Bushes (2007), Evens’ dreamy next work, earned him the first of five nominations for the prestigious American Eisner Award. What’s rustling? Among other things, a schlemiel and a girl on her period. It was because of this nomination that Evens’ comics were first translated into English and, soon afterwards, into other languages. Since Evens lives in Paris and is part of the hip graphics scene there, his books are usually quickly or even immediately published in French.

Evens created other, funnier creatures with Idulfania, the series he drew from 2009 to 2011 for Zazie, the youth supplement of the newspaper Brussel Deze Week (now BRUZZ). In Idulfania, he takes a good look at both fairy tales and medieval epics and serves up a wide range of gag strips that are reminiscent of Kamagurka and Jeroom in terms of absurdity and cynicism. The same sense of black humour is also used in the gag plates in Pieter De Poortere’s Dickie universe or Thijs Desmet’s graphic novel Smoking Kills (2018). The Idulfania strips were only finally collected in a wonderful oblong-format booklet in 2021. The two- to five-part series with doom scenarios and witticisms – all illustrated with Evens’ characteristic watercolours – really come into their own there.

Evens’ real breakthrough came with The Wrong Place (2009), in which he painfully dissects how uncomfortable (class-reunion) parties can be, a critique that he maintains and extends to every conceivable facet of urban nightlife in the weighty The City of Belgium (2018).

Via the characters of gray Gert in The Wrong Place and the questionable Jona in The City of Belgium, Evens calls to mind – with bright, hellish watercolors – the night-time side of existence with its hordes of hopefuls and the hopeless, their (self-)deception, drug use and increasingly pitiful idolisation of the hipster-of-the-moment. In between Evens’ smooth dialogues (including intriguing, nonsensical banter à la Tarantino) readers get chock-full ‘atmospheric images’ depicting bizarre street scenes or interiors with experimental perspectives and intertextual references to, say, Noah’s Ark or M.C. Escher’s lizards.

Throughout the interweaving of similar page layouts, there is a sense that the book is somehow winking playfully, asking the observant reader to follow a quest beyond the boundaries of these voluminous books. Think of motifs such as taxi scenes or cross-sections of buildings.

Evens regularly forces readers to change their reading direction by using meandering serpentines or spreads that make it hard to know where to start, though there are certainly also sufficient traditional waffle patterns. Every now and then he leaves his readers some space for meta-reflection on the medium of graphic books.

Another undeniable characteristic of Evens’ universe is the use of monochrome characters who speak ‘in their own font colour’ without speech bubbles. It is amazing how involved a reader can become with a monochrome main character such as Pieterjan in The Making Of (2011, the successor to The Wrong Place). Ultimately, the clear, formal choices do not detract from the depth of the dialogues or the characterisations. In The Making Of, Evens also pokes fun at the artistic aspirations of a group of hobbyists in a back-of-beyond hole called Beerpoele.

Mounting anguish and recognition

Panther (2014) is a completely different story. Here, Evens subtly and patiently unfolds the story of the seduction (rape?) of a young girl. Six years later, Ben Gijsemans also touched on the taboo of child seduction in his second graphic novel Aaron (2020), in which the eponymous main character struggles with his feelings for boys. But while Gijsemans focuses on the adult, Evens zooms in on the fate of the minor. Kristientje – a name that is as endearing as the way she is depicted – is a young girl who loses her beloved, emaciated cat. When her father cannot alleviate his daughter’s suffering, Kristientje falls into the manipulative clutches of a panther. Slowly but surely, Evens builds a tangle both around the girl and inside the reader, as he masterfully creates a feeling of oppression.

Here, once again, the book seems to be clandestinely winking at us, this time asking us to notice the details: the vase that shows the rear half of a slinking panther and the portrait of an adult woman on the wall signalling the painful absence of a mother figure, who we later learn wanted to kill herself.

That mother figure is also sorely lacking in Evens’ most recent book: The Jellyfish King, vol. 1 (2024). For the first time in his oeuvre, Evens has stated that he will come up with a sequel to this book. And a sequel is necessary, because things can really go either way in the mesmerizing father-son relationship of an arrogant art connoisseur/surgeon/scientist and his spartanly trained offspring, Arthur, who maintains his adoration for the man who narrows his world. Thematically and spatially, the parties and urban life make way for “more homely” atmospheres, but the search for security remains and is even more oppressive (because it is more treacherous).

In recent years, Evens has been producing more than just graphic novels and murals. He moonlighted as an illustrator for Dirk Leyman’s Reading, a User’s Manual: World Literature in Fifty Characters (2015). Gossips might also smirk at the storyless Paris (also 2015), from Louis Vuitton’s prestigious – or perhaps too artsy-fartsy? – Travel Book Series. Through the gouaches of his City of Light, Evens can now at least put himself on an equal footing with Lorenzo Mattotti and Jirô Taniguchi, among others: respectable names in the world of graphic novels.

Also very recognisable is Evens’ drawing for the French-Belgian-Romanian animated film L’Extraordinaire Voyage de Marona (2019), directed by Anca Damian. This stylistically and rather child-unfriendly, but strong and moving portrait of a dog that has been hit by a car, is definitely worth a look.

Evens has received his share of national and international nominations, prizes and attention for his work amidst the artistic stir of Paris for the past fifteen years or so. His creations are currently on display at the Centre Pompidou in the exhibition La BD à Tous les Étages (Comics on Every Floor), in which Evens is linked to painter Paul Klee. But at the Flemish level, the Bronzen Adhemar outshines all his previous recognition.

Aimée de Jongh, Ann Jossart, Kim Sanders, Kurt Snoekx, Rik Sturtewagen, Jean Paul Van Bendegem and the previous laureate, Judith Vanistendael – all jury members from the comics and broader cultural sectors – praise Evens because not only does he raise the Flemish comic strip to an art form, but he also does it internationally while, at the same time, inspiring many young artists in the medium of the new Flemish comic strip.

With this so-called “new Flemish comic strip”, Evens, but also Lukas Verstraete and the aforementioned Ben Gijsemans, have forged a connection with the artist Frans Masereel. A century ago, Masereel was already depicting the big city in textless black and white cuts. Works such as La Ville (The City, 1925) and Bilder der Grossstadt (Pictures of the Big City, 1926) are now eagerly called “graphic novels” and show labourers in their working environment, along with their amorous encounters and some modernist interiors in Paris and Geneva. At the same time, Evens’ work is reminiscent of the cityscapes of Ever Meulen, author of Brussels in Vuitton’s Travel Book Series, and the watercolours of Marc Palmer. The exhibition De Stad (The City) at De Meridiaan in Blankenberge connects their work.

Brecht Evens received the Bronze Adhemar on 6 September in Turnhout, at the small, proud Adhemar statue. The connection with the comic strip character is fitting: just like the brilliant son of Marc Sleen’s famous Nero, Evens has an innate ingenuity for iconoclasm and artistic inventions that depict his time.

In keeping with the good Turnhout tradition, the presentation of the Bronze Adhemar will be accompanied by an exhibition by Brecht Evens at Cultural Centre De Warande.

• cartoon
• comic book
• comics