FLORENT

“By collaging numerous photographic images in a mosaic format, a painterly surface develops and expresses simultaneous macroscopic and microscopic views of the earth, a place or a concept.” 

The shadows, elbows, statues, and pieces of gardens we glimpse on these surfaces are always from the travels and lives of others. The work situates the artist as a passive, lonely observer of strangers’ memories with the power to make new meaning from these fragments.

In the early 1980s, Eriksen became studio assistant to Michelle Stuart--perhaps the only mentorship which had a direct effect on the content of his own work. At the time, Stuart was primarily constructing grids of encaustic mixed with natural materials. This grid formation left a lasting impact on Eriksen’s compositions. So, too, did the structural formatting in the work of François Morellet, with whom Eriksen was personally close (and who was the father of his lifelong friend Florent). Morellet’s commitment to order, pattern, and geometry resonated strongly with Eriksen. In contrast, Eriksen’s work displays a vastly different sensibility in its dedication to a humble, measured poeticism.

After Eriksen left Stuart’s studio, he began to use found photographs as the basis of his collages; cutting them individually by hand into precise squares and mixing them together by color in the Trois Petit Cochons boxes the restaurant used for paté. He began to create large-scale, multi-part collages which when brought together formed composite patterns. Eriksen worked on his collages ceaselessly-- during every free moment at work; into the night at home. This processing and slicing of photographs, organizing them meticulously by color, and then rearranging them into fantastically kaleidoscopic new grids, developed into a decades-long, active meditation. 

Eriksen’s journal entries from the late 1980s reveal how critically his life balance depended on his art. As a gay man living through the AIDS crisis, the extreme order of his work functioned as a bastion against the chaos of his historical context, and as a tangible way to ground himself amidst a barrage of daily trauma. In a stream of consciousness, Eriksen described the frantic, debauched energy of a community on the cusp of devastation: 

“I have seen that when I am self-indulgent and uncaring that the ‘guardians’ (my expression) abandon and punish me until I see it and resume my duties. For example, the period in time when niteclub + cocaine were my priorities and my home became filled with insects— fleas. It was a sign from them to me to realize my priorities and not indulge in the earthly pleasures as a thing of its own. The knowledge and insight claimed through those things are important, but to be totally involved with them is a lost soul.”

Eriksen rebounded from this personal nadir to invoke his work as a touchstone. Nature is a recurrent signifier throughout his work, foregrounding Earth’s indomitable persistence in the face of human cruelty and pollution. In intentionally scattering and reorganizing his materials, Eriksen sought to construct new dynamics, perhaps in order to replace old, dysfunctional ones. From another entry: 

“Combinations of simple geometric forms become metaphors [for] our myopic reality… and allusions to the vastness of the solar system.What we are now familiar with will one day be either objects of curiosity or fragments of the old ways and the old gods. By taking our objects and beliefs and seeing them in this way, I begin to get a glimpse of a culture and a religion not yet in existence.” 

Eriksen’s life’s work was the poetry of a compulsive person seeking order through passionately arranging new systems. Throughout Eriksen’s quiet career, he remained committed to the ecstatic future he envisioned: in which humans surrendered to the unwavering mystery of the natural world.