Erik Parker
Is it Something I Said?
19.01.06 - 11.03.06
"Welcome to the world of Erik Parker " one is tempted to say, when introduced to his first solo exhibition with Galleri Faurschou in Denmark. It is a very personal, expressive and visually seductive universe Erik Parker invites us into when encountering his large and multi coloured works.
Pink, green, turquoise, blue, purple, yellow: Intense colours interlace in organic shapes, psychedelic patterns and symmetrical reflections. In an arabesque of flora and fauna, comic-strip characters appear cheerfully and monstrous with big noses, lips, eyes and mouths, partly dissolving in the paintings multicoloured tendrils.
In addition to shape and colour, words are significant ingredients in Erik Parker's work. Often, the theme or title of the painting is announced in large letters across the canvas. In his drawings, the words enlarge across the paper, appear from an elephant's trunk or are encapsulated as narrow text inside the head of a drawn figure. In the significant handwriting, occasionally with Parker's own ways of spelling and laterally reversed words, influenced by his dyslexia, there is both humour and sharp sarcasm. An example of this is when Erik Parker relate to art collectors and auctions houses within the art world in his works; an economic circulation which his works has become part of.
Often, pieces of sentences overheard from other people are the starting point for a theme in a painting. In the actual making of the work, Parker deliberately lets his own associations flow. Music is a prerequisite for making this kind of art. Erik Parker's studio in Brooklyn, New York, is dominated by a large table in the middle where the paint pots are arranged by colour, so his work pattern is not disturbed by taking up time looking for certain colours, adjacent is a second table with his mixer & turntable, the portable Mac, his vinyl records are stacked in boxes on the floor. All together these components creates a rhythmic "groove", clearly visible in Parker's works.
Erik Parkers works are unique in their artistic idiom. There is graffiti, acid-rock-poster-style, pop and sub-culture in his psychedelic fantasy world, which artistically relates to painters like Philip Guston and Carroll Dunham.
The lyrics of Erik Parker's paintings are in their seismographic recordings of contemporary discourses at once both relevant and humoristic cultural analyses of our time.
Private view Thursday 19. January from 5pm to 9pm.
Galleri Faurschou is open from Tuesday - Friday 11am to 5pm, Saturday 11am to 2pm.