In his older work he liberates things from their stable forms and dissolves them in light.

Here and there scraps of objects are still recognisable, but are often busily making the effort to discard any suggestion of utility by means of reflections and other optical illusions.

Without fail, they are on their way to an eternity in which time and space have become abstract concepts.

Everything becomes one.

The flip side of this is that this attempt to go beyond the image, to look behind things, in turn yields wonderful new images – images that invite the viewer to enter the space of his or her own thoughts and switch on the light there.

‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light’, Evers tells me.

That’s in the bible, in Matthew 6:22. It’s a beautiful motto for a photographer.

Very quickly we are talking about Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Osho, pentagrams, astrology, the Golden Section and Eros.

The photographer as mystic. In Evers’s case, anyone who might imagine something hazy resulting from this is well wide of the mark.

His work – particularly his older work – is clear and powerful.

Dissolving in light is sometimes an intense process.

In the 1980s he based his photographs on installations of 2x2x2 metres.

What is interesting is that it is hardly possible to reconstruct the installations from the photographs. The reality has been so forced apart by the lens that it has become insubstantial and mysterious.

‘I wanted to fascinate. It simply had to come out. I was full of holy enthusiasm.

A question of age, just like the urge to reproduce,’ admits Evers.

‘Later, because of a change in consciousness, my work became more transcendent and abstract. Myself I became more balanced.’

Then Evers began working with computers. After 2000 he also began to admit narrative and symbolism to his work.

‘Now, in 2008, I have the feeling that I have still not been clear enough, that I have to do more with the surface,’ he says.

Bodies are surfacing in his work, generally without a head.

The photos are also sometimes taking on an erotic charge.

But the subject invariably remains that we are a part of something infinite, that we are permitted to walk with that infinite energy for a ways, and chiefly that we must not think that we are too important.

‘Being to Know and Knowing to Be’ he adds, ‘That I often omit the heads is because what is happening is much bigger than the head.

The images are about heart energy, about eros, about the muse – and ultimately about the naked fact that everything is connected with everything else.

For instance, the pentagram has five angles, many flowers have five petals, and a hand has five fingers.

That is not for nothing. It means something: it shows us that in our human capacity we are also part of a certain divine geometry.’

As I leave he gives me a quote from Osho to think about: Everything that is spoken, is in the service of the unutterable.

 

Rommert Boonstra