Brecht Evens

Born in 1986 in Hasselt (Belgium), Brecht Evens, a Dutch-speaking comic strip artist, studied at the prestigious Luca School of Arts in Ghent. Embodying a new generation of gifted and cultured young authors with a multicultural orientation, he was noticed at the age of 24 with Les Noceurs (Actes Sud), the publication of his study project. He was awarded the Willy Vandersteen prize and then the Daring prize at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2011.

The artist draws his inspiration not only from the Cubist and Expressionist paintings of the nascent 20th century, but also from the genre scenes of Flemish tapestries evoked by the characters and stories that abound in the abundant universes that are his favourite, with a style characterised by a mastery of colour and transparency, the explosion of perspectives and an extreme attention to detail, a style that also borrows from Persian miniatures.

Also in 2011, Brecht Evens publishes Les Amateurs (Actes Sud), in which, recounting the disappointments of an artist in search of inspiration, he offers a ferocious critique of the outrageous pretensions of the contemporary art world in its secondary spheres and attempts to reexamine the link between art and nature.

In 2014, Les Cromosaures de l'espace (Actes Sud) will be published, a youthful comic strip in which a space captain must repel the invasion of strange creatures. The same year, with Panthère (again on Actes Sud), he indulges his pronounced taste for dreaming: in this album about the fears and mental universes of childhood, Brecht Evens creates the protean figure of Prince Panthère, an irresistibly charming feline but animated by ambiguous intentions, who settles into the life of a little girl living alone with her father and mourning the death of her little cat. In this fable, the aim is to demystify the emotions of childhood.

Since then, its reputation has continued to grow, both in France and abroad. Contacted for the "Travel Book" collection of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, in 2016 he produced a beautiful travel album with the theme Paris, where, since 2013, Brecht Evens lives and works, as well as for the press, fashion and art galleries.

2018 sees the publication of a new comic strip, Les Rigoles, for which the author was awarded the Fauve-Prix spécial du Jury at the 2019 edition of the Angoulême Festival.

In 2019, the artist was chosen by Actes Sud to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publishing house and, for this anniversary, developed a two-part world frieze. Already in his country of birth, he had created gigantic frescoes (in Antwerp and Brussels, for example).

Photo by Thomas Vanhaute