ENGLISH "Sylvester Engbrox, painter." Max Torregrossa.

Exactly one hundred years ago, Kahnweiler exhibited Braque’s landscapes that the Salon d’automne had turned away. In Gil Blas, Vauxcelles, who often took well-expressed short-cuts, pointed out the painter’s way of reducing everything to cubes. Now we know what the critic had witnessed: the demonstration that painting could be reinvented.

Today, many artists profess the same goal of starting from scratch, which, depending on your point of view, is a sign of either vitality or degeneration. Personally, I believe that the desire for a relationship with the past is more interesting than wanting to break with it, because continuity is closely connected to the creative impulse, if one agrees that it is a prerogative of the human soul. In other words, without a relationship to the past, there can be no future.

Sylvester Engbrox’s work is interesting both for its relationship to its forerunners and its prospects of autonomy.

Apollinaire imagined the need to destroy the idea of a creative God and “excavate nature” for the benefit of non-figuration and unlimited deformations. His wish was actually nothing other than the denial of an imposed reality—a denial found in Engbrox’s work, where a man’s gaze has modified the reality used before being recomposed by that of the artist.
The “Harlequin effect”, an assemblage of bits, shapes and colors from various sources that no longer creates the expected surprise and astonishment but something more intimate, also remains in Engbrox’s work from this period.

Engbrox, who had sound training in photography, has long been confronted with the reality that the medium imposes. Photography’s main goal is to capture an existing materiality, a certain reality. But, because photography was his profession, Engbrox knows perfectly well that reality is often altered, deliberately or not.
Leaving aside the technical issues does the world exist in black and white?, let’s think of Weegee, who “arranged” the meeting between the drunken woman and the two socialites arriving at the opera for his journalistic photograph The Critic 1943. Likewise, Jeff Wall digitally doctors his very elaborate pictures while keeping the idea of showing a kind of authentic reality.
Engbrox, then, knows that visual perception is a fabrication. That is why he does not like it when people use the word “realism” when talking about his work. He prefers “figurative” because everything that is seen in it, and that can be easily recognized as tangible reality, is modified in his depiction.

The “Harlequin” effect takes shape in Engbrox’s work through his obsession with collecting photographs and drawing inspiration from them to make his paintings. If that is not enough to completely explain what makes him tick, perhaps the phenomenon of music sampling is. Sampling involves taking snippets of existing music and combining them with each other, sometimes changing them, to create something new. When record companies realized how important the trend was and started selling “ready-made” batches of samples, they fell flat on their faces. Why? Artists found the samples interesting because they had “lived”, were a slice of reality, were not artificial. Taking those bits of reality, assembling them, and putting them to purposes other than those for which they were originally intended produces a fascinating sort of über-reality.

Engbrox’s work is in a similar vein. He clips pictures from travel agency catalogues, TV magazines, the tabloid press and Internet. All of them have one thing in common:  they are poorly reproduced and intended to be seen by as many people as possible. That is what interests him. Poor reproduction ensures that they will not be vested with any particular meaning, in which case they would have been “processed” better. What’s more, the alterations and modifications remain limited to the mechanics of publication poor printing, poor paper, poor framing, poorly-adapted materials, etc.. As a result, the images are as “neutral” as possible from the painter’s point of view. On the other hand, the fact that they are meant to be seen, and have been, confers the reality of the other’s gaze upon them. Like music samples, these images have lived. They have been experienced and can be used for an assemblage.
The combination of those two aspects — a “Harlequin” type assemblage and the use of the other’s gaze—constitutes the particularity of Engbrox’s work.

What is the result?

To appreciate it in the literal sense of the term, one must whiff the sickly sweet scent of the Pre-Raphaelites, that of Millais’s Ophelia or Louise Jopling, in the intangible, if not spectral, realism of Engbrox’s work. The same kind of distance between representation and onlooker in Millais’s and Engbrox’s paintings can be found in Cézanne’s works, where the apples look wonderful but do not make you feel like taking a bite out of them. In these paintings, reality lies someplace else than in the simple reality of representation. In Engbrox’s work, the role attributed to the gaze creates the distance.

Figures, most of them nude or scantily-clad women, appear in all of Engbrox’s paintings. There is never a still-life or landscape and the characters do not pose. It is impossible to imagine them in the painter’s studio; they are caught in the action. In other words they are watched, caught doing something, even if that something is odd or unlikely, such as emerging nude from a plane wreck. The onlooker is a voyeur.

The figures are often shown unclothed, sometimes through some invented transparencies or the effects of splitting them in two, which adds to the sensation of seeing what is usually hidden or not willingly shown. That makes you think of the patristic vision of the light crossing the glass bottle near the Virgin of the Annunciation to reach the water without breaking the container. In this case, the light that engenders is the gaze of the spectator turned great organizer.
All of Engbrox’s scenes have spaces that the watcher, unlike the figure, cannot access: the dark doorway of the fuselage the woman emerges from in Air Disaster, the ground that the young man is looking at in Young Man in Swimsuit, the disquieting blue-black water that the three women also nude are about to dive or jump into in Pool, the space behind the wall in the bathroom that a woman with no feet and strangely dangling arms is looking at in Bathroom. All these spaces off limits to onlookers generate emptiness inside them, strengthening their position of voyeur. In the final analysis, the gaze of others participates in the painting like the thousand other gazes that have manufactured the photograph the artist used.

“I want to be a machine,” Engbrox says. He speaks of painting as though it were the result of a computer that crashed and from which a hard drive with a few incoherent files have been recovered.
His painting achieves the opposite of what a prism does. Instead of breaking a complex beam of light down into several basic, component beams, he receives a multitude of iconographic realities from his collected images and recomposes them into another complex reality, unreal as such, but so thick with certainties and experiences that the outcoming image is unsettling, graphic.

Engbrox, then, is merely an intermediary, a tool, a machine, and he admits it. That is why he explains or suggests nothing in his paintings: neither eroticism nor guilt nor suffering. He just shows. And the outcome really is a “show”, in the literal sense.

 Max Torregrossa, january 2008

Traduction: Glenn Naumovitz