The universe of painter Etienne Elias, pseudonym for Etienne Michiels, shows fragments of his daily surroundings, all rendered in vital colours. The figures in his work are passive, almost emotionless and often anonymous. Elias’ oeuvre traversed various styles, forms and themes for more than forty years. And yet it is consistent in its diversity: Elias always saw a painting as an autonomous object in its own right. Through the successive pictorial trends that he followed in his career, which were part of his enduring quest to revive figurative freedom, Elias undoubtedly contributed to the repositioning of painting.
After training as an artist, Elias entered the Augustinian monastery in Ghent where he lived for four years as Brother Elia. While there, he evolved from painting the apostles in a Flemish-Expressionist style to a more abstract and informal technique. It was during this period that Etienne Michiels adopted his pseudonym: like Elias (Elijah), the father of the apostles, he wanted to bring about renewal. When he left the monastery, the artist exchanged abstraction for explicit, expressive figuration. He started to paint his everyday surroundings: interiors, austere figures, furniture. Roger Raveel, one of the pioneers of the New Vision [Nieuwe Visie] in painting, noticed the playfulness in Elias’ work during the 1960s. Building on the Surrealism of René Magritte, and the Fauvism and Expressionism of Jean Brusselmans, Constant Permeke and Frits Van den Berghe, amongst others, Raveel initiated a figurative interpretation of reality. In 1966, Raveel invited fellow artists Raoul De Keyser, Reinier Lucassen and Etienne Elias to help paint the cellar corridors of Beervelde Castle. The final work had a spatial and illusionistic effect that captured the essence of the New Vision. Within the evolution of painting in Flanders – and in parallel to the international New Figuration movement – the New Vision is of singular importance to this day. Most notably because it paved the way towards new ways of seeing and alternative forms of depiction.
In the early 1970s, Etienne Elias deepened his oeuvre in line with Raveel and the New Vision. He became increasingly interested in the Old Masters. Inspired by the glazing techniques of the Flemish Primitives, he painted small, meticulous canvases using thin, transparent layers of colour. His fascination with the past even led to a flirtation with miniature art. He shared his love of nature, fairy tales and the strange perspective of Renaissance architectural compositions with the leading lights of British Pop Art, such as Allen Jones and David Hockney. In the late 1970s, Elias was stimulated by the subjective and explosive New Painting movement. In brutal, Neo-Expressionist and figurative works, the German Neue Wilden and the Italian Transavanguardia artists not only expressed their social unrest and disgust for hypocrisy and fascism, but also their resistance to abstract and conceptual art. Elias plunged into raw, emotional painting with abandon. Again, he departed from the relativity of human perception: in stunning colours, he linked fictional worlds and memories to real objects and environments. He cast a magical, poetic or humorous veil over everyday reality. His colours brightened and abstract shapes and characters crept into his figurative repertoire. Elias lived in Amsterdam from 1985 to 1989. He sought a closer connection with emerging trends and a richer cultural climate. The harmonious calm in his work slid into a turbulent, almost wry imagery. Figures came to dominate, sometimes naked and depicted in erotic scenarios.
Elias was an indomitable and lifelong maverick. Although Ostend was a source of inspiration, he found it difficult to connect with the city. In the era of Minimalism and conceptual art, Elias’ work was branded unworldly and outdated. But the renewed attention to the repositioning of painting confirmed Etienne Elias’ place in art history. In 2005, two years before his death, he was the subject of a retrospective at the PMMK, now Mu.ZEE, in Ostend.
