The Spirit of Ecstasy
2012
Book, 16.5 x 23.4 cm, 224 p, language: English, publisher: Bruxelles: Éditions Komplot & Black Jack Éditions, ISBN: 9782960120714.
Materials: ink, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/239).
Literary synopsis A group of protagonists build a castle and an exhibition inside. Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice *The Spirit of Ectasy* began as a project in 2009, when a group of 10 artists asked David Evrard to help them to make a catalogue for the exhibition they were making in the south of France. After two or three meetings, Evrard told them that he wasn’t really interested, but that he could write a fiction instead, in which all of them would be the main characters. Thus, those ten artists became the protagonists of the novel. David Evrard approached the creation process of the novel as an object, as one more piece within his practice in the visual arts. For him, it is like making a sculpture, ”but just with many more layers”.
Authorship: Artist Author.
Creative Strategy: Artwork-Novel Parallel Lives, Artworks Biographical Origin .
Genre: Adventures, Erotic/Pornographic, Fantasy, Fictitious reference work, Historical fiction, Historical non-fiction, Interview, Roman à clef, Speculative Fiction, Tragic Farce.
Publishing: Art Books Publishing House, Non-profit Art Organization.
Theme: Accidents, Anarchism, Art, Death, Desire, Disintegration, Drugs, Ecstasy, Everyday Life, Feminism, Ghosts, History, Love, Memory, Mysticism, Perverse Sexuality, Photography, Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Humanism, Psychedelic Mundane, Religion, Rituals, Sculpture, Secret Societies, Socio-Political Critic, States of the Self, Subjective Experience, Systems Theory, Violence.