"A shift in the desire to paint". Jean-Luc Chalumeau

The first thing you notice about Sylvester Engbrox’s painting is that it defies classification in any trend or school. Several may come to mind, but none really fit: his work is so rich and groundbreaking that you must start with defining it by what it is not. For example, the lone figures, often female nudes, and couples, who are obviously not communicating with each other, recall Edward Hopper. Is Engbrox the heir to mid-20th-century American realism? Not at all, after taking a closer look. Moreover, to clarify things “to rid myself of Hopper”, he says, the artist has parodied the famous Nighthawks 1942 by setting a lone, seated man in a deserted, windowed, semi-circular commercial space a car showroom without another soul in sight.

Engbrox often integrates expressionless female figures into his complex pictorial compositions. Their underwear, if they are wearing any, emphasizes their breasts and genitals more than it conceals them. Jennifer 2006, a movie actress, immediately recalls how David Salle has Karol Armitage, another actress, strike bold poses, which he then photographs and integrates into his huge paintings. Engbrox does not take offense at the comparison because he likes Salle’s work. But as far as he is concerned, it is not that at all: it has nothing to do with post-modernism, and he never borrows references from museum works for his paintings. Unlike Salle, he does not associate his nudes with a painting by Hobbema or a piece of African art: that kind of sophisticated manipulation of the world’s cultural heritage is not his thing.

There is no denying Engbrox’s realism: the relationship to photography is obvious. Is he a hyperrealist? Not at all: the hyperrealists respect the directions of the document they borrow – often even compulsively following them – and consequently submit to the conventions of perspective that photography imposes. Engbrox could care less about those conventions. What’s more, he jubilantly transgresses them, for example in Arcades, where the row of lamps is arrayed pictorially but not realistically: “it’s totally inaccurate from that point of view,” the painter says half-smiling. There is no use in trying to make him a son of Richard Estes.

The many young female nudes in Engbrox’s paintings recall the scantily-clad girls abounding in pop art, from Wesselmann’s pin-ups to Jim Dine’s and Allen Jones’s models and Mel Ramos’s sexy bombshells that look as though they are straight out of a truck driver’s calendar. Female nudes have always been associated with pop art, haven’t they ? But Engbrox’s forlorn women are light years away from tantalizing pop models. They climb out of plane crashes, unscathed but in a state of shock. The dramatic dimension in both versions of Air Disaster is completely foreign to the pop spirit. No doubt about it: Engbrox is neither a pop nor a hyperrealist artist.

But aren’t the running people Downtown, nude man asleep on a beach at night Nude, Bilbao, young Asian woman walking towards us as three shady-looking types hiding in the darkness observe her Arcades, and girl surrounded by skulls Dead Beat Club there to tell us something? Engbrox’s painting is obviously figurative, but might it be narrative as well? That would be a total misinterpretation: if Engbrox’s images have any meaning, he does not know what it is and lets the viewer make it up. In contrast, the narrative figuration artists have highly specific things to say, be they political Rancillac, Fromanger, the fear of death Monory, the vanity of all things Télémaque or the absurdity of the world Erró, which is nearly the same. No, Engbrox is not a candidate for admission to the second or third generation of narrative figuration.

Engbrox does have something in common with the post-moderns, hyperrealists, pop artists and nearly all the narrative figuration painters: he uses photography — but in an absolutely personal way. Perhaps, after reviewing everything he does not do, that is what can help us define what he does.

It should come as no surprise that Engbrox received advanced training in photography: he is an outstanding technician in that area. This might explain why for him photography is essentially connected to the depiction of reality, which is not his goal as an artist. Painting offers him the advantage of being able to put his fantasies on canvas, the possibility of giving form to what is commonly known as expression. Engbrox chooses images in the bottomless well of the Internet and randomly, intuitively puts them together. He likes the fact that their quality is often flawed: instead of glossing over the defects he accentuates them with painting, providing him with an opportunity to try plastic experiments.
I used the word fantasy, but the term should not be taken literally here. For example, female bodies are in his paintings, but their purpose is not to express Engbrox’s sexual desire. The work “derealizes” the reality a photograph offers more than it aims to “realize” the fantasy’s “dereality” to use Jean-François Lyotard’s terms in an imaginary space. An example is Red Dress: the young woman’s garment is the main subject, because that is the name of the work.
The painting is vigorously structured by two huge openings in a monumental wall seen from a diagonal. The woman in the red dress is slightly off to the left: she is the symbolic, not the geometrical, center. The dress is transparent: her breasts and the dark spot of her pubis are clearly visible. The spot is the focal point of the symbolic center itself. No dress worn on the street reveals so much. Engbrox constructs his painting, then, not to depict reality but to create a falsely realistic image out of an expression of fantasy. Since Cézanne, everything that has mattered in painting has sought not to numb consciousness and fulfill the viewer’s more or less avowed desire, but to produce on canvas a kind of analog of the subconscious, which, Freud taught us, is the seat of sexual desire.

In another painting, Lift, two figures appear to be in the same plane. On the left, a woman’s head and shoulders can be seen in a frame drowned in pink that probably signifies the elevator. She sadly looks down. She is dressed, but her clothes do not let her chest show through, as in Red Dress. She does not or does not want to? see the man with his back turned to us on the right, a dark mass who, the painter seems to indicate, is looking at her. The folds of his coat are treated in the same way as the curtain strangely framing the elevator, which would suggest that he is not in front of the woman but next to her. The scene is dreamlike: nothing is “real” in this painting, if not the eeriness it elicits.

Engbrox sifts through the teeming images on the web, choosing those that will help him, based on his own sensibility, not to fulfill who knows what desires by deluding him which is what the painters of 19th-century academic nudes did but to methodologically disappoint him by exhibiting its machinery. Here there is a shift in the position of desire, which might be a shift in the desire to paint and perhaps, consequently, a shift in the very function of painting.
Around 1860, Manet was already demonstrating that photography would not kill off painting: it was even nurtured by it. In 2007 Engbrox reveals that instead of liquidating painting, the world of Internet and pixels give it a fantastic opportunity to bounce back. Take the lavish painting called Pool. Three nude women look at the dark water of what we can assume is a pool. Two of them dip their toes into the black liquid with an extremely graceful movement of the body. The third is poised to follow suit. They are three graces in fact. But neither they nor the vegetation behind them are perfectly clear. The artist plays on the outlines’ blurriness. What’s more, he accentuates the white shadows around the bodies and on their respective surfaces those shadows are not lines and lets them freely move around. Was Engbrox thinking of Braque’s Billiards in the National Museum of Modern Art, which is considered to be the last great still life in the history of painting? I do not know, but this green is the same color as the billiard table’s baize, and the white shadows organize the masses and strangely break them the same way Braque does. Engbrox paints what there is around things as much as he does the things themselves. These women are mere shapes: they have no psychology and do not really have faces. They are pictorial objects: in 2006, Engbrox painted a “still life” the women look nearly dead because they are about to fall “into emptiness, not into the water,” he says, but one of an absolutely new kind.

In short, Sylvester Engbrox seems to have freed himself from influences that could have had an affect on him Hopper, Klimt and others in order to invent, based on photographs from the web, a style of painting that is both utterly contemporary and deeply rooted in the history of forms. Successes like this indicate that painting is alive and has a bright future ahead of it. That, I am sure you will agree, is good news.

Jean-Luc Chalumeau
November 2007

Traduction: Glenn Naumovitz