Sílvia Muñoz d’Imbert
To Evru, the books, notebooks, diaries, sheets or even the small cartons in which he draws every day without rest are so essential in his career as the fact of breathing. Through them, creation and life, fantasy and reality, take shape and manifest themselves in the most direct way possible. Since his beginnings, with the First Book Enemy Myself (1968-1971), the list of author books and notebooks has been numerous and exceptional, as evidenced by the fact that the first exhibition dedicated to him at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona in 1989, after having exhibited “Les Magiciens de la Terre” – which was organized by the Pompidou Museum in Paris – was devoted to this omnipresent and flowing aspect of his artistic career: “The Books of Zush”.
In this case, Evru presents us the work that he has been doing in the last years through the dialogue that he has established with other artists, friends and colleagues in the long space of the leporello. Coming from the Eastern tradition, the leporellos are formed in a role of paper that unfolds like an accordion, which can be drawn on both sides and whose fundamental element is the continuity of the discourse that extends in space.
Evru starts this new adventure by the hand of his friend Jean Willo, the artist of Swiss origin who currently resides in Ibiza, and with whom he reunited in his sixtieth birthday in 2005. It was from this meeting, that the project of making a book “with four hands” came up. Afterwards, Feliz Waske, another Austrian friend and artist – and also resident in Ibiza – would join them, and with who they would continue to dialogue through the unfolding sheet of the leporello.
If on one side, Waske would make seven more leporellos with other Austrian artists with whom he would exhibit at the Frankfurt Fair, Evru continued with the adventure half way through the concept of the surrealist cadavre exquisand the correspondence with so many other creators, such as Frederic Amat, Pablo Milicua, Tatino and Elia (Alice di Carlo) – a young Italian artist born in Pescara in 1985 who connected with Evru through his studies and work around poetry, writing and drawing in 2011.
Their common interests would lead them to make a series of leporellos, in which they reflect on the dissolution of the artist as a figure, a factor that has always been present in Evru’s work from his beginning through his change of identity, until arriving to the willing of making the “I” disappearing through the collective and web work. In the leporellos of EliaEvru, the limits between the work of one author and another are inseparable, elaborating a language in which the flaw of line is unreachable and unattainable. They make a series of work on “four hands” in which the two authors dialogue through their drawings, they paint and erase on what the other drew, deepening in concepts such as identity, authorship, the loss of control over one’s work or the fragmentation and dissolution of individuality.
If to Evru the figure of the artist is condemned to its dissolution in the sea of creative potential that all of us human beings share, it is undoubtedly his print – the work – what appears as the authentic reason of being for his work. A work that researches in line, the one that builds new alphabets, draws new calligraphies and writes new letters to the universe, from a fully free world where the frontiers between the creative subjects have disappeared, giving place to an informal magma from where beings of strange bodies and enormous eyes are born, celebrating their birth and striving from the very first instant to escape their limitations.
Not in vane, Evru pretends to create through his work, a piece of Universalist sign that will agglutinate all the art that has existed in the past, the present and the future in some sort of primitive digital aesthetic that gathers all the looks and writings of all times.