Author: sera

Paul Carey-Kent. Art writer and curator (IAAC), Editor of Seisma Magazine.

On first encounter with Kristian Evju’s paintings, it’s hard not be drawn into matters of technique. The combination of precisely attained hyperrealism with peculiarly atmospheric monochrome is the marvel that draws us in. How does he do it? Part of the answer is that he doesn’t paint everything once, but twice: first in acrylic, then in oil as he shifts details and seeks a translucence. 

But that’s just the means to an end. It’s not so much the ‘how?’ as the ‘what?’ that is the essence of Evju’s art: what are we seeing, and why? The role of the technique is to add conviction, to draw us into its apparent reality. 

We might start, then, with the show title. What sort of whispers are we talking about here? It’s natural to think of Chinese Whispers – the sequence of gradual transformations through oral transmission whereby, iconically, ‘Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance!’ became ‘Send three and four pence, we’re going to a dance’. Evju operates visually, not verbally, but just as the ‘final version’ of the words is perfectly clear – but isn’t the same meaning as the original – Evju offers us clarity, but at several removes from his sources. 

In fact, he starts at one remove, as he doesn’t paint from the world directly, but from a vast archive of how the world has been recorded. Restricted colour takes us further from the ‘realities’ in play. Latterly, Evju has also used Artificial Intelligence to transform the archival images. In his current body of work, he plays Sigmund Freud into the picture, too. That seems appropriate, because Freud operated in what might be seen as a parallel way: by ascribing new meanings to what issu b conscious, most famously by interpreting dreams to relate them to the narrative of the dreamer’s life. Evju provides us with dreams of a sort – images whose clarity lies on the surface, the mystery of which lies elsewhere. That leads the viewer to puzzle over what the underlying meaning might be – if there is one. A sceptic might challenge Freud on the grounds that those meanings aren’t actually there, but imposed on a stream of, for example, random detritus from the mind in off-mode. Evju might be teasing us comparably: perhaps he provides the form of meaning without its function, operating in the manner of teasing poets such as John Ashbery. Consistent with that, weare not dealing with a fixed interpretation. ‘I look at paintings like arguments about whatever I’m trying to explore’, says Evju, ‘but who knows what that is?.

Let’s take an example and see where it might lead. ‘The Garden II’ is from a series Evju calls ‘Freud’s Garden’. He says he is ‘trying to construct an archive depicting an imaginary Vienna based on the visual knowledge I possess – I have never been there – and a careful reconstruction using ChatGPT to generate iterations of words and prompts for various AI image generators’. That’s a nice touch, Evju never having been to Vienna, ensuring that the operation continues to be distanced from the inspiration. I’m reminded of how Bacon used images of Velasquez’s ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’,1650, but never sought to see the painting itself. Evju then went on to use prompts like this: ‘Black and white vintage photo of a Viennese psychoanalyst standing with medicine bottle in lush, overgrown garden in Vienna…

’We arrive at an AI version of Freud’s garden – and, possibly, of Freud himself, as Evju also hoped by this means ‘to find ways of making it generate a portrait of Freud without mentioning him by name.’ That sounds like an odd combination, AI and Freud, yet I wonder. Freud was keen to embrace new technologies: he was, for example, one of the first people to fit an electric doorbell. And it’s perfectly possible to conceive of AI as complementing his therapeutic approaches. AI algorithms have the potential, through machine learning, to analyse enough patient data to recognise patterns, perhaps ultimately allowing them to predict psychiatric conditions before they manifest severely. Whether that will enable them to be tackled successfully is another matter: treatment might still require something akin to the way Freudian psychoanalysis dives into subjective experiences and unconscious motives. Such a combination could be the future of analysis: while technology can augment our capabilities, the human connection may remain essential to foster healing and growth. We might compare that, in turn, to how Evju sources his material through the relatively impersonal means of the bulk archive and the intervention of computer programmes – but the ninvests his own time and expertise to convert that into a more personal artwork, coherently assembled and adjusted as he sees fit. In that case, Evju’s whispers from the unprovable past and the potential future might represent an in-between state that contains and displays a present truth: we are on a path from Freud to AI and back again.

We’re still in Evju’s imaginary Vienna in the Project series. Here, he says, he wanted to paint interiors from imaginary Viennese salons and ballrooms, but from alternative, more dystopian timeline. They are populated with AI-generated debris, mixed with images from archives, as in the bizarre encounter of ‘The Project IV’. What might be a mansion, stage or nightclub is painted in a lush green, as if the vegetative backdrop has infected the whole. Perhaps the series presents one version of Vienna from the many there might be if we follow the theory of possible worlds. But maybe not. As Evju himself puts it, ‘it is hard to tell fiction from fact, mirroring our reading of reality, or even our sense of self.

That potential for confusion, while it has always been present, has been taken to another level by computerisation and AI. Remember when a photograph was commonly taken to be indexical, as proving ‘how things really were’? Photoshop, digital manipulation and filters have put paid to that. AIis extending such doubts rapidly. Can we tell if the faces generated by the application of Generative Adversarial Networks to huge data sets – as at the website ‘This Person Does Not Exist’ – are real people or not? A worrying feature of such generative material is that the results depend very much on what is in the data sets – and they are likely to replicate wider biases. Thus, ‘The Zizi Show’, Jake Elwes’ well-known work from 2019, skewered the hetero-normative bias inherent in the usual material by showing what happened if 1,000 images of drag queens were added in to the database. Likewise, Evju says he wanted to make the AI generator come up with a convincing version of a female psychoanalyst or researcher from the time of Freud. But ‘the AI was very resistant to the idea, and refused to clothe the women it generated in anything but clothes worn by a maid or assistant.’ So he had to compile his own version by combining various sources.

We can take that trajectory a step further. Will there come a time when the Turing Test is routinely passed by robots – that is to say, a human evaluator, who knows that a conversation is between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses, cannot tell which is which? Can we imagine a worlds in which it is plausible to ask: am I an AI? We seem to be moving on to another possible path: not towards Freud using AI, but towards Freud being an AI. These are giddypaths for the historic analogue technologies of drawing and painting to tackle, and I like that: the most traditional and exacting of means, beautifully exploited by Evju, proves to be the portal to any number of unexpected alternatives.