Jan Paul Evers
03 Jul - 27 Aug 2011
JAN PAUL EVERS
3 July - 27 August, 2011
Jan Paul Evers’ photographs are indeed a print of reality. However, the meaning of this definition taken from documentary photography is subtly shifted in Evers’ works. While it was photography’s foremost task since its invention in the early 19th century to depict and capture outer reality, in modernism the focus was more on inner reality or a different reality, expressed in surrealistic or constructivist photography. When taking a look at present-day photography, the viewer is familiar with the fine borders between documentation, staging and the abstract possibilities of the medium drawing with light. Furnished with this knowledge, one encounters the analogue photographs of Paul Evers, which are all unique copies. The motifs are diverse: advertisement, art history, magazines, architectures, all the way to abstract formal languages. The depictions, which at first appear non-objective, are often of actually existing architectural details. What all photographs have in common despite the diversity of the motifs is the black-and-white reproduction and the rough granularity of the picture surface which is created by using light-sensitive photo film material and at times intensified by zooming into the respective motif. In the photo lab, the print of the world is taken from the original reference system by means of blocking, fanning and templates. An iconoclastic process unfolds: Visible reality is dissolved, and in the thoughts of the viewer a new world with its own, at times narrative relations is constructed. In Evers’ photography, it is ultimately the gaze of and the insight through the viewer that constructs the differentiation between abstraction and objectivity.
In his photographs, the print of reality is no longer an unambiguous connection between the image and what is reproduced, yet it is a print of the reality of current patterns of perception and the diversity of different models of explaining the world.
3 July - 27 August, 2011
Jan Paul Evers’ photographs are indeed a print of reality. However, the meaning of this definition taken from documentary photography is subtly shifted in Evers’ works. While it was photography’s foremost task since its invention in the early 19th century to depict and capture outer reality, in modernism the focus was more on inner reality or a different reality, expressed in surrealistic or constructivist photography. When taking a look at present-day photography, the viewer is familiar with the fine borders between documentation, staging and the abstract possibilities of the medium drawing with light. Furnished with this knowledge, one encounters the analogue photographs of Paul Evers, which are all unique copies. The motifs are diverse: advertisement, art history, magazines, architectures, all the way to abstract formal languages. The depictions, which at first appear non-objective, are often of actually existing architectural details. What all photographs have in common despite the diversity of the motifs is the black-and-white reproduction and the rough granularity of the picture surface which is created by using light-sensitive photo film material and at times intensified by zooming into the respective motif. In the photo lab, the print of the world is taken from the original reference system by means of blocking, fanning and templates. An iconoclastic process unfolds: Visible reality is dissolved, and in the thoughts of the viewer a new world with its own, at times narrative relations is constructed. In Evers’ photography, it is ultimately the gaze of and the insight through the viewer that constructs the differentiation between abstraction and objectivity.
In his photographs, the print of reality is no longer an unambiguous connection between the image and what is reproduced, yet it is a print of the reality of current patterns of perception and the diversity of different models of explaining the world.