EPKER press

Shimmergift
by Mischa Andriessen

It must have been about fifteen years ago that I was camping with a couple of friends in a clump of trees behind a factory site in the Flemish Oostmalle. We were broke. Therefore we had tried to find a concealed place where we could put up our tents. We sat in a ring around the gas burner and the empty plates, the only light provided by the floodlights which illuminated the buildings, throwing a blue- green shimmer upon us and our tents. It must have been our conscience, but anyway we constantly had the idea to hear someone in the coppice. An idea that was forced upon us with growing darkness, became stronger. Like young children we tried to comfort ourselves: it was just imagination.
Every single one of us had forgotten about the incident when, weeks later, we gathered to look at the holiday pictures. At a certain moment my heart missed a beat: behind one of the tents was a figure of above average length, with the moon shaped face of every sorcerer in children's books. I showed the picture to my friends. We all saw the shadowy figure which had kept us awake for so long at that time.

     The demon has had to give up a lot of credits in the course of history; beginning as a deity he became from demigod to ghost to finally end as the representative of evil. It has in particular been Christianity that has been responsible for this development. Different from pagan religions the teachings of Christ presents a complete dichotomy between good and evil. Besides; beauty could only be found in the good. The Romantic artists rebelled against the mores. They more and more often tried to find the beauty in the elusive world of demons. Through secularisation this so called black romance has largely become lost. It has remained in horror movies and certain types of pop music, but it no longer is a progressive movement.
     The Romantics and their successors the decadents, who even went a step further than that, have tried to control the old fashioned ritual of fear by provoking it, by trying to get it back into daily routine. Now that both opponents play a marginal role, fear and aggression have become elusive emotions, because they can not be channelled. In our imagination evil is mostly the unknown. That is what Christianity has taught us, pagans knew better how to deal with the uncertain.
     In his brilliantly written book "The Photographic Delight". Arjen Mulder dilates upon cavepaintings such as they were left by the prehistoric people
in Lascaux. The interpretations are countless... A theory exists that a shaman withdrew into a cave with paintings in it and there he turned into the various species of animals in order to copulate with them and thus to revive the herds which then could be hunted.
     Metamorphosis has been a way to survive, but also one that brings to life. Gregor Samsa, the unhappy protagonist from Kafka's famous story
"metamorphosis", did not only escape from his old existence, he brought back a new form for it, a new form that, as all new things, confuses. But also recognition; only that what is inhuman allows us to converge with ourselves.
     Arjen Mulder has yet another solid observation. He claims that we, in
our observations, are often preconditioned by a medial view, especially in direct confrontation with nature. By way of illustration I'll give my favourite image from nature; a heron, frozen in waiting on the bank of a ditch. An experience of immediate now-ness.
     In the photographical works of B.C. Epker these two experiences hatch a plot. In many pictures nature forms the background, the setting in which metamorphosis occurs. Even when the setting is a living room or a small powerhouse near the railway line, it does not change the expression. Something is being extracted from reality to make it real. Epker adds something to that.Things are being extracted from fantasy to become reality. Fantasy partly becomes reality. Demons gain appearance. Twilight gets a face.

III

In a picture from a somewhat older series made by B.C. Epker, a small figure dressed in dark blue is next to a predominantly white drawing of the artist. Behind the drawing on a wooden tripod a white veil is draped and has a large knot in top. The figure, a girl, has long curly hair held together by
a rose-red cap. She stares to the left, her left arm seems to have disappeared. It could be that the left arm supports the tripod which therefore becomes something like a spear, as the girl becomes a guard. Persephone, the bearer of destruction and master of Hades or is she protectress of the arts; Athena?
Besides something frightening, probably the uninterpretable, the picture radiates something reassuring. The fixed gaze of the girl is exactly opposite to the frank expression with which the man in the picture comes towards us.

There is a legend which says that a white scientist Yacoub, an example of the evil genius as it was often used as a character in the gothic novel,
the high point of black romanticism (remember Frankenstein), invented
time on the Greek isle of Patmos and so brought doom into the world. What has always fascinated me in the work of B.C. Epker is that his drawings and etches have always been overflowing with movement, without time playing a role in it. In the photographs that I've seen so far as well movement as time have been brought completely to a standstill. That way, menace is evoked, they are so quiet that something must be about to happen. It becomes even more disquieting, when you realize that actually there is no reason to expect the terrible. We see children with masks in a tightly staged pose. It is the immeasurable strength in Epkers work that I can give away the essence without cutting back on the experience. I know every person in those photographs, still the disquieting feeling which is so familiar, creeps upon me. Reading underneath your blankets, putting on a brave face when watching horror movies with friends, and not only enduring a thousand terrors, but knowing that they have to endure the same.

The Spanish writer Javier Marias has once stated about the literature he loves that it had the following in common: "She does not tell about the well
known, but the exclusively known and at the sametime unknown. Without being able to explain, she tells of mystery".
The picture with the shadowy figure I have no more. But I know that it would, even though we reconstructed it, me and my friends; a raincoat on a clothesline, lamplight bunched into the moon sickle-shaped face that terrified us so badly, still not let me unmoved. Reason is a bad counsellor when the experience has manifested with great intensity.

Translation by Berber Epker