Hans Theys

 

 

 

 

____________________

Hans Theys

 

 

Vessels for the Invisible

Some words on the work of Ermias Kifleyesus

 

 

 

Introduction

 

We first met in 2007. At the time, the Belgian artist Ermias Kifleyesus (born in Addis Ababa in 1974) was studying at a Belgian post graduate academy for aspiring artists. I liked his humour, his wit, his attitude and his work. Last week he invited me to his studio to have a look at his paintings. After 13 years of silent working, he feels the time has come to introduce them to the world. And he wanted me to be their chaperone. 

Ermias’s¹ paintings are characterised by complex surface textures, created by moving back and forth between the four basic layers of a painting (canvas, primer, paint, varnish). But they are also linked to a social experience. To speak about them, I will have to elaborate on both elements. I will start with the sociopolitical experience because it preceded the painting technique he developed (not forgetting, however, that Ermias trained as a painter in Ethiopia, long before he arrived in Belgium).

 

Embedded in the social fabric

- The first time we met was at this weird academy in 2007. You had made still lifes using discarded materials such as cardboard and plastic foil, visible only in a mirror that framed the composition. One of the still lifes looked like a landscape. It contained light effects and abstract parts that reminded me of Ingmar Bergman, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Gerhard Richter. The still lifes were very painterly because of the compositions, the added artificial light, the values of grey and the soft shadows. It seemed to me you were testing the guest lecturers by showing them stuff that was nearly invisible. Only the mirror testified to the presence of something. A year later, you used video cameras and monitors to direct the viewers’ attention to compositions that were part of what looked like piles of garbage.

Ermias: I remember your first visit vividly and your saying: ‘Our society looks clean, but the garbage is hidden’. And you also said: ‘What can be expected from the press? The truth of the News cannot be written in the time of one night.’

- In the nineties I was a regular visitor to the home of a painter friend, Franky Deconinck, who liked to hide things in plain sight. In the hallway hung a huge map of the world. When welcoming a visitor to his home, he always drew their attention to the map. He told me that nobody, apart from me, had ever remarked that he had painted away Africa. Panamarenko tested his visitors in a similar way by not pointing out new sculptures. Artists taught me to be attentive. 
 Ermias: At this post-graduate academy I lost my naivety. I came to understand the difference between art and the art world. I had expected the institute and the guest lecturers to be open, but it was all about hierarchy, fame and untransparent business under the table. Mind you, this was before MeToo and Black Lives Matter. The place was dominated by white macho males. I called them ‘peanut faces’. They wanted me to make documentaries.

- Last year I heard the same from a film student of North African descent. She left a school in Brussels for the same reasons. She couldn’t just make a fictional movie; it had to be a documentary about the condition of ‘her people’.

Ermias: ሆድ ይፍጀው Let the stomach obliterate it, as we say in my country. Though we say it differently. We divide the body in four parts. The first part is the head, the second part your chest, the third part your lower belly and the unnameable things, the fourth part your legs and feet. ‘Let the third part destroy it,’ we say…

      They didn’t like painting. I had to hide the fact that 
I painted. There came a time when I decided to shut the door of my studio and not invite any more guest lecturers to visit. In Ethiopia we have a saying that goes: ‘Let the gut destroy it’. If a pain-thing happens to you, you don’t talk about it. You get on with your life and let your body digest it. And one day you make something beautiful out of it without a therapist (laughs)! And that’s what I have done. For the past 13 years, I have been working on my paintings. And now I am ready. That’s why I called you.

- In 2009, I saw a magnificent painting you had done of a church. I remember very sensually applied earthy tones: yellows, ochres, but also fluorescent colours…

Ermias: I was trying to twist the Belgian style of painting, I needed to find a new space for painting.

- In a review I published you said the following: ‘A painting has to be shiny, fresh and warm like a penis. It has to attract people like a magnet. The fresh elements, such as the fluorescent colours, come from the street. To me this painting is like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem (the Buraq Wall or Western Wall), where people leave messages. The painting contains messages or titbits I had overheard in the neighbourhood, as if I had stuffed it into the wall of the church.’

Ermias (laughs).

- Could you remind us how it all started? How did you manage to infuse your paintings with social reality? And how did this lead to their complex surface texture?

Ermias: When we met for the first time, I had started gathering stuff that supermarkets had thrown away. I went through their trash. I wanted to make magic. Not money, but magic. And in order to find that magic, I had to say no to the hierarchy, to the values of the peanut faces. I wanted to peel off society’s varnish. 

In the skips I found food past its sell-by date: herbs, seeds, beans, powders. I took them to the studio and turned them into installations which I lit with blacklights. I was interested in the pigments, the colours created by disco lighting. 

- I remember a table you had turned upside down and filled with spices. It smelled delicious. I also remember tiny sculptures made of penne rigate, which were hardly noticeable, spread around your studio.

Ermias: I also started making videos of those installations. And I became more and more interested in the people that live on the streets. I began thinking about interactive situations, taking my art onto the street. I took my table out there to confront people with it. On one of its legs, I had attached a video camera. Lots of people come to Brussels, the so-called centre of Europe, and they come unstuck. They live on the streets. I wanted to incorporate their lives, but I was unsure how to go about it. I made interactive films, but I was not really satisfied with that approach. Something else had to happen.

 

Telephone shops

Ermias: In 2006, one year before we met, I started leaving things behind in the booths of international telephone shops. You rarely see those phone shops now, but in those days they were meeting places for immigrants who went there to call home, to send faxes, make photocopies, play games, use the internet and discuss politics and daily life. They were a hive of activity. Very lively, creative places, frequented by people from all over the world.

- Like the post-graduate academy, but without the peanut faces.

Ermias (laughs): I added items to the phone booths, such as reproductions of old masters, posters, plain paper, alphabets and tape. All sorts of things. I remember a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio folded in such a way that his eyes were concealed. 

The users of the phone booths interacted with these objects without realising they were making interactive drawings, collaborating with me and others. This absence of consciousness was important to me. I will come to that later when I talk about my work with recycled clothes.

      I arrived in Europe in 1998. For years I used those telephone booths myself to call home. In 2006 a miracle happened, showing me how I could use the booths to make artworks.

- What happened?

Ermias: On returning home from a telephone shop, I leaned on the sink and noticed that my hand had left 
a mark on it. I realised that the mark came from the phone booth and that I could detach the marks left by the callers and transfer them to other surfaces.

Initially, I placed little tables in the phone booths, which I could remove afterwards. Then, step by step, I started working with paper and posters. I visited the booths several times a week and often added something to whatever images or text I found there. Eventually, when I felt they were ready to be completed in the studio, I removed the supports from the walls. The time this process took depended on the location of the phone booth and how much it was used. 

My work was about investigating connections, transience, meaning, differences and similarities between times and places. To me the marks left in the booths were akin to cave paintings, evidence of fact and fiction, conscious and unconscious scribbles, numbers, codes, needs and dreams. Each mark was a minute record of life, a trace of someone’s existence, charged with echoes of absence and presence in a place devoted to international connection. The final drawings were containers of emotion with a complex texture of interwoven layers of doodles, texts and imagery. The surfaces were dynamic, consisting of a seemingly infinite variety of materials, even punctured and repaired at times.

Today, 17 years on, I still work with these phone booths, even though they are disappearing now. I think it’s an exciting time. I think it’s important that I’m making these works in a digital era. My works are made by multiple hands, by collective synapses.

- Later I saw that you transferred drawings from telephone booths to walls.

Ermias: After leaving this postgraduate academy, in 2009 I think, I wondered how I could use the energy of the telephone booths in oil paintings. That’s when I started transferring phone booth drawings to walls.

- You showed some at ‘The Gunshot’, a group exhibition of paintings I organised in 2013. Your paintings were barely noticeable, very delicate.

Ermias: In 2013, I was working in hiding. Several people advised me to study for a PhD, but after my experience with the peanut-faces, I shunned institutions. Paradoxically, students from several universities came looking for me, which was nice.

It was then that I started observing things at micro level. I looked for traces of people, hairs, fingerprints, stains, flecks, spots, specks. I magnified them and made tiles out of them for an immigration museum in Molenbeek. My rolls of tape contain many weird particles. some of them stay alive. I never expose them to sunlight, so that they can germinate and hibernate peacefully.

When you are an immigrant, you are searched, scanned and examined continuously. They need your fingerprints and your DNA. They want to inspect all cavities and scan you thoroughly to make sure you are not transporting germs or other secret, invisible stuff. They push you to the micro-level. As a reply, the particles became my connection to the stars, they are my guides. When I came to gather traces and marks at the telephone shops, I also checked under the tables, where you find glue to kill cockroaches and poison to kill rats.

I try to capture the DNA of a place, to trace the synapses of the social fibre, to leave tattoos. I am always trying to connect to the people on the streets, adding and removing, creating and destroying, just as a painter does.

All my works start from ongoing research: reading, gathering things, meeting different people. Every morning I do my job as the concierge of a dance company. When I finish there, I walk to a nearby second-hand market where I look at the objects on sale and talk to the people I meet. Then I visit a series of phone shops until I reach my studio in Molenbeek. On these walks I meet lots of people who are almost invisible and whose needs are generally ignored by the decision makers. All these encounters are my daily inspiration, they nourish me and the paintings I make.

 

Painting

Ermias: Belgians and Europeans are proud of their old masters. But they only seem to be interested in the result of a painterly activity. They are proud of images, but they don’t know how they are made or where they come from. To me the craft and tradition are as important as the result. I feel a real affinity with artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan Van Eyck. Coming from another continent, I want to dive into their world and add something to it. I want to add a touch of magic to it. 

      Flemish painting differs from Italian painting because Flemish houses have small walls and big windows. In Italy the walls are bigger and the windows smaller. That’s why Flemish paintings seem closer to the hand of the artist. They are smaller, painted on an easel, more earthly, more grounded. Very often they depict daily life. To compete with the light that floods into the room, they add light to the painting. This addition of light, combined with the grounded nature of the paintings, is very important to me. The inner space of a painting is filled with darkness. I want to bring light to that darkness.

Paintings are living creatures. They have lived, they have been somewhere, they have travelled. Some are cracked or crumpled, sometimes sand has accumulated in them. They have been damaged and repaired, admired and neglected. I gather them and take care of them, wash them, sleep with them, work with them, return them to society. 

      For a long time I wondered how I could combine my work in the phone shops with painting. I was looking for a meeting point, a hub, where the technique and the history of oil painting might meet the layered, collaborative drawings. What was painting, essentially? How did our relationship with the world change when fat and pigment magically met?

      The tables I originally placed in phone booths had two sides. The invisible side was interesting as well: it’s where the callers left chewing gum, snot and other stuff. They also scratched matter away. Gradually this brought me back to oil painting. Lucian Freud speaks of a conceptual space outside the canvas. Fontana cut through the canvas to create a conceptual space. My conceptual space lies between the four main layers of a painting and in a spatial combination of them. It’s a unique space which, as far as I know, is used by nobody else. Some people also work with secondhand paintings, but they do not detach them from the support, they do not reverse or split them. I travel back and forth between the four layers of the painting. I call it ‘canvas on oil’, because I reverse and split paintings to create intricate surfaces. 

      Everything had to be reversed. To confront the wave of the system, the institutions and the obsession with concepts, I grabbed the expanse of the universe, the particles and the stars, the earth and the sky, to ride the wave of the physical, the concrete. The work became a ghost rider.

- The four main layers of a painting are the canvas, the primer, the paint and the varnish. Using different techniques, you separate these layers and transfer them to other supports. The way you do this and the manner in which parts of several layers of one or more paintings are combined define the specific surface, structure, texture and visual aspect of each new painting. Painters in the West concentrated on creating an illusion of depth and volume on a flat surface. Contemporary painters have turned their attention to creating pictorial depth using contrasting colours and textures. You push this new tradition to the extreme by separating the four layers of paintings and reassembling them into new textures and compositions.

Ermias: I bring light to the darkness where the four layers meet. Art is a form of hope for me. I believe it helps cultivate democracy. I create an allegorical space using X, Y and the possibility of detaching and reusing the four different layers. Every painting is the result of cross-pollination between elements from the four different layers. Each layer tells a story that is itching to be revealed. I can take the viewer to each of these layers by scratching off the surface or by peeling off a painting from the canvas.

- You can peel it off?

Ermias: Sometimes I work with existing paintings. But I can also make a painting myself, knowing that I will peel it off the canvas later. In so doing, I can more or less predict what the result might be. These pencil lines, for instance, (he shows me a drawing on the surface of a painting) were the first lines I added to the primer. The same goes for the figures and the colours: the objects that are added at the beginning will resurface as the top layer once I have detached the layer of oil from the canvas and the primer. 

(He shows me crumpled paintings lying on the floor. They are finished paintings on top of which he has glued a new canvas. They are drying. Later, when separating the two canvases, the first colours will show on top of the new painting. This working method is combined with a variety of other techniques. When I suggest I film him, he removes paint from a dark-skinned character in a found painting to darken the skin of a character in another painting. But he can also scratch away layers, combine different paintings, etc.)

- First you stretch a clean canvas. Then you prime it. Here and there the ground layer shows through in the final result. I have the impression that it already contains tiny specs of material.

Ermias: Indeed. I use rabbit skin glue, but I mix it with leftovers, with society’s waste, with dust and paint I have gathered from the surface of an existing painting. Then I think of a composition. In Ethiopia great value was attached to the composition of a painting. And I love that. In this case, the original painting was a colourful rendering of a marketplace in Africa where they assemble and sell artificial flowers. The painting was made with the intention of transferring it afterwards. 

When a painting is finished, I stick a new white canvas onto it, using very strong glue. Then the painting is left to dry on the floor, resembling a landscape with mountains and valleys. When it’s dry, I peel off the skin of the painting, revealing its insides, i.e. the first elements I added to the ground layer of rabbit glue.

- That’s why some paintings are leaning against the windows? So that you can see through them? So you more or less know what you are going to find?

Ermias: There are things hidden in the dark. I love to step into that darkness with my torch, jumping from the X and Y, diving deep down and resurfacing with something precious. Here and there I leave things behind for future visitors to the same darkness.

- You think like an archaeologist. Going through the skips of supermarkets, you emulate their explorations of ancient fireplaces, shitholes and more official disposal sites. The garbage of the past 
is the bible of future archaeologists. 

Ermias: The future is important because society is not ready. There is always a gap between art and the art world, between art and people. Especially today, the system creates a gap. It reinforces division by class. It is based on hierarchies. And these hierarchies are its main concern, not the art itself. Most people in the art world are not trying to understand paintings, but the constructs they themselves have erected. And they always come back to you, to absorb you. Without support, you cannot resist.

- What do you do with the first canvas once you have peeled off the painting?

Ermias: I reuse it. I reuse everything. Very often I don’t know where I want to go with a painting. I just add elements. This can take months or years. As you can see over there. (He shows me the actual painting studio, where canvases and large paintings under construction are piled up, some of them cut into pieces and reassembled to form new compositions.)

      I also use old clothes. Many of the clothes collected in Belgium are shipped to Africa. Before they leave, they are compressed to save space. I buy them and decompress them so as to integrate them into my work. I visit the compressor shop, pick out the garments that interest me and add oil blots to them. To me these blots function like Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots. In his case inkblots were used as a way of probing the unconscious mind, whereas I try to suggest a psychoanalysis of this society with its waste, pollution and neurotic need for new objects. I also cut the clothes, I rework them. It’s a complex process.

In my work, front and back exist together. Just as the beginning, the middle and the end of a painting’s making coincide. This multiplicity is important to me. When I peel off a painting, I don’t always know where I will end up. Sometimes it is unpredictable. In the middle of the painting? At the beginning? In several places at the same time, creating a kind of fresco? I like the idea of splitting a painting in two so that it resembles an open book, revealing the makings of a myth. Endless complex things happen, none of them predictable. All paintings collaborate to provide concrete building blocks for new ones. I can recycle ad infinitum. I like to include amateur paintings, society’s rejects, the unwanted. 

We live in times of pointillism. Everybody is interested in a dot, everybody thinks about just one point. I would like to transcend this. The biggest problem we have today seems to be a lack of collaboration. Between people, between artists, between our leaders. My work tries to create a parallel world where people can meet and collaborate. I try and peel off the varnish of society, talking to people, reusing old stuff, having things work together and piercing the façades, looking for cracks and synapses. This city is home to many powerful international institutions, but also many invisible people. I want to see them and discuss their world. My works want to be their vessel.

- Can you tell me something about this painting?

Ermias: It is called ‘No Market Today’. I wanted to visit a particular flower market in Africa, but when I was about to visit it, it was closed because of Covid. The painting refers to Ta Matete (We Shall not Go to Market Today, 
a beautiful group portrait painted by Gauguin using the Egyptian perspective and style. I used elements of his painting and combined them with other flowers.

      The painting next to it is a portrait of Malevich, made seven years earlier. I split it into two layers, separating the top layer from the canvas and the ground-layer. This produced two new paintings. in one of them Malevich became an Afro. He turned black, like his square.

- And this painting? I like the parts around the figurative representation. The beautiful textures. The evocation of darkness.

Ermias: This painting represents the 1885 Berlin Conference that led to the artificial partitioning of Africa. It is based on a photograph in which not a single African appears. I love the details. Every part of a painting counts. Even the folds and the nails are important. The holes made by the nails, because when you transfer the layers, these holes may well survive. No work has straight borders or corners. Every work is an ongoing performance. First it is loved and used to decorate a salon. Then it is discarded. Along the way, it has to contend with dust, moisture and sunlight. It may be rolled up or folded. It may develop cracks. All these eventualities leave their mark. And they produce a smell, the smell of abandoned objects.

               I would like to give viewers perspective and proof. I would like to get them involved. I would like them to  walk around in a painting as if it were a village.

 

Montagne de Miel, 10 June 2023

 

 

 

 

Notes:

¹           In all my texts I refer to artists with their family name to avoid the fake familiarity that has become fashionable in the media. However, in Ethiopia family names stricto sensu do not exist. One gets a second name, which is one’s father’s first name, and a third one, which is one’s paternal grandfather’s, and so on. When Ermias reads the name Kifleyesus, he thinks of his father, not of himself.