Patrick Everaert (1962, Charleroi, Belgium) is a disruptive artist. Acting as a painter without being a painter and as a photographer without being a photographer, one can say that he likes to mislead his interlocutor. His work questions the notion of the image and the power it carries. For many years, he has been collecting photographic documents that arouse his curiosity. Whether they come from magazines, books or the Internet, these documents are, after being manipulated, deprived of any caption or context in order to hide their meaning. Paradoxically, it drowns the image in order to increase its potential for expression. Certain paths can of course be marked out with our own references (literary, philosophical, anatomical, botanical, etc.) but they quickly become obsolete if they are confronted with other opinions; each viewer interpreting the mystery in his or her own way.

One of the principles of Patrick Everaert's work is the slow process of collecting images over a long period of time and allowing them to "mature" in order to be extremely precise and sharp in detail. In this sense, his work process is very organic.

Witold Gombrowicz wrote in one of his diaries that "the artist must go to each individual, discreetly take him aside, whisper a few words in his ear and very discreetly ask him to recognize him". Patrick Everaert does not act differently. Playing with the certainty that images inspire in us (even if in the digital age, man's critical mind is set in motion), he infuses doubt, humour, drama and melancholy into his paintings, with the effect of opening up his art to a new way of apprehending the world. In the end, what is reality? Can we answer by default: what is not real?

"Take my images for what they are: invitations to the intellectual and sensitive exploration of an undefined space of meaning. What prevails here is the quality of the path that each person will take to approach an interpretation of the image that will belong to him alone...

The work is played out in the temporal space between the moment that marks the beginning of the confrontation with the viewer and the moment when the "claritas" occurs, the final moment when the image gives itself for what it is and when it reveals itself in its own identity.

Postponing the moment when the image reveals itself, gives itself, defines itself. What can be defined is finished (dead). By attempting to produce the indefinite, I try to move towards the infinite.

Patrick Everaert does not seek to deliver any message. The role of the artist is not to create movements of thought but simply thought in motion.