Erró

Erró is the pseudonym of Gudmundur Gudmundsson (b. 1932), an internationally famous postmodernistic artist. Although from Iceland, he has lived in Paris since 1958. He was the first Icelandic artist to work with Performance Art in the early 1960s, but did so alongside working in the film industry doing video art.

Erró began exhibiting in the 1960s and even went to Venice and Milan to participate in exhibitions protesting France’s colonial war in Algeria. In Florence he met one of Surrealism’s lapsed successor, the poet and visual artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, who became his close friend. Erró has much in common with the French 'narrative figuration' tradition. His early oeuvre – which includes highly detailed frescoes, phantasmagoric crowds of people and fusions of animal and mechanical forms – harkens back to older art and Hieronymus Bosch, but also to modern sources of inspiration such as Roberto Matta. A pivotal experience which affected his subsequent career came when he visited New York in 1964 and was inspired by popular culture’s endless stream of pictures, especially cartoon strips and films, advertisements and political propaganda.

In his works Erró criticizes society, but he also refers to more general phenomena such as the connection between original and reproduced pictures, and the effects of the pictorial glut generated by media. His themes are peppered with weapons, violence and sexuality, but his diverse background, curiosity and breadth of expertise also contribute to his artistic identity. By blending disparate styles and pictorial languages, Erró succeeds in creating a playful, diverse, raw and provocative expression packed with references. To his art he also adds a large dose of humor, critical power and voluptuousness. As he himself has said: 'I paint because painting is a private Utopia'. Nor does Errò balk at borrowing well-known elements from artists like Picasso, Legèr, Van Gogh, Mirò, Disney and Dali, turning them into a 'potpourri' that affects our reading. His art is closely related to works by Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein.

Out of the Way (1975) is a thematically complex collage from the series Made in Japan (1974-76). We see an erotic scene created in a visual language which Japanese artists traditionally practiced as a form of meditation; it was an ascetic practice. The cliché about Eastern erotica in contrast to Western, commercial, market-oriented pornography undergirds the title of the pictorial series. Out of the Way’s upper register contains elements of violence, destruction, domination and aggression, all of which are appropriated from American cartoon strips and political posters. In the lower register a sex act is depicted. The two registers create a contrast between the contemplative, calligraphic modus of Asiatic erotica and action heroes like Superman and other 'science-fiction' figures. At the same time the picture emphasizes a contrast between two sources of pleasure and satisfaction: love and war. Our attention is drawn toward the tensions between the picture’s various elements.

BL