Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez Saint-Malo

Erró. Back to Saint-Malo exhibition

from 14 May to 5 September 2015 (extended to 12 September)

Hundreds of exhibitions worldwide and records in auctions make this Viking, born in Iceland in 1932, a contemporary art legend. His challenge was to bring together on gigantic frescos, in thousands of allegories, all of the images and desires of the century.
For this exhibition “Erró, Back to Saint-Malo”, Erró made collages representing the corsair city; as well as a print, L’Égérie de Saint-Malo , presented in a portfolio. The exhibition gathers paintings (glycerophthalic, mixed techniques), collages and prints. The artist especially made collages blending the ramparts and the villas of the Sillon of Saint-Malo with the comics, manga and animated movies universe.

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Exhibited works

Exhibition’s photography

Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez
Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez Cristel Éditeur d'Art Center Saint-Malo
Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez Cristel Éditeur d'Art Center Saint-Malo
Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez Cristel Éditeur d'Art Center Saint-Malo
Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez Cristel Éditeur d'Art Center Saint-Malo
Exposition Franco Salas Borquez Centre Cristel Éditeur d'Art Saint-Malo
Exhibition Franco Salas Borquez Cristel Éditeur d'Art Center Saint-Malo

Erró
Definitely inimitable

But where to start? By his life, intrepid, fabulous, or rather by his work, one of the most impressive and remarkable in modern painting? To take the measure of it, the essayist Guy Scarpetta did not fail to warn: “Erró is also, certainly, the most prolific artist who has ever existed since Picasso.” In truth, the man he greets, born in Thor, Iceland on July 19, 1932, seems to push every limit. Did he not undertake, according to his own formula, to “synthesize all the images of the world”? A hallucinated quest, clearly linked to the Nordic sagas that nurtured his childhood in the arid setting of volcanoes. Then came the age of the first ambitions… Surprisingly strong, wonderfully gifted, Erró enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Reykjavik, from which he graduated, at less than twenty years old, “with the best mark ever received in Iceland” .

He sailed for old Europe, visiting museums and cities. The destiny of a Viking, of course, and that of a prodigy capable of casting on a canvas, in many exhibitions, the hated mask of tyrants, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, the sumptuous body of a woman, the popular silhouette of Mickey and Japanese manga. In short, the synthesis he always dreamed of… And, for historians, a phenomenal tour de force allowing him to impose, in the face of American hegemony, an allegorical conception of Pop’Art. Anthropologist Marc Augé summed it up exactly: “Erró, mythical painter”!
Yes, fascinating colossus, whom nothing can stem, neither fame nor sensational auctions – a collector paid up to 1,234,696 dollars at Christie’s in December 2007 to acquire Comicscape, one of his many paintings monumental. But, once again, Erró doesn’t care. “All dogmas and official rites leave me cold. My independence is inalienable”, he announced already in 1960. The instinctive reflex of a traveling bard who, in his very independence, does us the honor, today, of returning to Saint-Malo, where he once put his bag . “I was walking on the Sillon, passing in front of the Hôtel des Thermes and in front of what I looked at as small fishermen’s houses”, he breathes. Then, in a tremendous momentum, pencil in hand, this master throws a muscular muse over the corsair city.

Christophe Penot
Art editor