The 50 years that Evergon spent photographing “his life” will be found at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ). The exhibition Intimate theaters, signed Bernard Lamarche, curator of contemporary art, will bring together 230 works. The program is shaping up to be epic, and not just because of the number of images.
Deadpan, the artist, born in 1946 in Niagara Falls, sums up his first major retrospective with a quip: “Some images might not shock you. Through the portrait — and the self-portrait —, the landscape, the still life, and by means of different processes (studio photography, collage, Polaroid, hologram), formats and references to the history of art and to gay culture, Evergon has made the body, nudity and sexual intercourse his themes. “There will be difficult works, recognizes the artist. They will have their own room. You will have the choice to see them or not. And he adds: “It is the spectator who decides whether a work is provocative. »
The title of the exhibition evokes intimacy, because Evergon’s photos are love letters. He addressed them to his flame of the moment, to friends or to his mother. Working with her — the touching series Margaret and I (2003) — the artist observed the aging of bodies, including his own.
To the question “Is there a common thread?” » the man answers spontaneously: « Me. His work and his life – “his life as a lover”, he specifies – are intrinsically linked. ” [Ma pratique] is a window on my world. Fellatio or other sexual acts, that was my world,” he says.
By meeting him at his home, in the Sainte-Marie district, in Montreal, we see that he is not obsessed with himself. Its walls are covered with works by other artists. “My students,” says the ex-Concordia professor, pointing to photos of Sara A. Tremblay and Darren Ell.
Evergon comes from the years of struggle for the equality of homosexuals, then from those where “we stopped wanting to be like the others, [où] we wanted to be ourselves”. These claims inhabit his work. “The exhibition is that of a politician and an artist”, proclaims the one who judges to have led a political career. Not without shocking, even his environment.
It was out of a need for authenticity that Evergon adopted photography, the queen discipline, in his opinion, for talking about truth — and its opposite. ” [La photographie] allows you to play with the truth, with non-truths, to fabricate them, to make people believe that it’s real. It is a power that painting and drawing do not have. »
In 50 years, truths have been created. So much so that the MNBAQ exhibition will only show, he assures us, the tip of the iceberg. It is from his basement that he extracted the essentials, helped by the artist and critic Didier Morelli. The exhibition took shape in this way, in times of a pandemic, with the museum curator stuck in Quebec. “Bernard [Lamarche] absolutely wanted the picture with the dog [Kiev, de la série Chez moi, 2006]. I wanted fellatio,” he laughs.