LYON.- Erró is one of the leading figures of the 1960’s European avant-garde and in the history of the art of this period, his name is associated not only with the revival of figurative painting, through his invention of collage-paintings with their critical or satirical subtext, but also to the movement of happenings and the wave of experimental cinema. Although often linked to art groups such as surrealism, narrative figuration or pop art, his work cannot and should not be reduced to any one of these.

The act of creation for Erró has since the late fifties meant using existing materials as the components of his work. He recovers materials—texts, images or objects—to appropriate or distort them and give them a unique meaning. He situates or places these heterogeneous elements into new configurations and new stories. The artist is the author of a large number of collages of illustrations, which serve as the matrices and models of all his paintings thus far, but he is also the creator of assemblages, kinds of three-dimensional collages, and several films, the temporal equivalent of collages. On occasion, he has also tried his hand at writing, producing a kind of literary collage.

Erró is an unconditional fan and virtuoso of collage. He made his first tragicomic collage-drawings as part of the series Radioactivity in Jaffa in 1958, but it was in Paris, in 1959-1960, with the series Méca-Make-Up, with his compositions combining machines and mechanical spare parts with the faces of models, that for the first time, he began to translate or transpose into painting several of these montages of illustrations. It wasn’t until 1964, and the immersion of the artist in the endless stream of mass images in New York that this composition technique in two stages was systematized and collage became the unique key to the creative functioning and production of all his work. Imbued with the idea that ‘everything, absolutely everything, has already been photographed, filmed, drawn’, Erró henceforth engaged in a patient and diverting task of compiling, questioning and subverting all these images-signs (cartoons, caricatures, political propaganda posters, advertisements, reproductions of works of art, erotic prints, postcards…) that saturate the social space and supplant reality.

Wherever his travels took him, from Paris to Bangkok to Formentera or other places where he lived and worked from the seventies onward, including notably Amsterdam, London, Moscow, Rome, Cuba, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Stockholm, Reykjavík and Berlin, Erró collected thousands of visual materials which he would use as fodder for his work. From the confrontation and assembly of these images, he developed thousands of collages and canvases, grouped in series, of a great variety and often highly complex, responding in his own way, to the excesses of “contemporary super-modernity”.

In the age of Internet and the “Googlising” globalization of the world, Erró’s work, rich and abundant, has gained new relevance with his “databanks”, his “copying and pasting”, his “flux or flow of images and information”. The exhibition at the macLYON intends to show the artist’s development and to address the multiple aspects of his career. The first floor of the museum is devoted to the earliest period of Erró’s career—the years 1955-1964, which will see the rise in importance or recurrence of “ready-made” images in the creation and constitution of this special language which is still his today. The other two floors will follow a thematic chronological thread, displaying various pictorial series or supra-series, such as the “scapes”, the “portraits” or the “history paintings”, which recur at regular intervals. The exhibition will conclude with some of Erró’s more recent works.