1970's cigarette advertising revisited Collage

Born in the sixties, Eric Lafoy left France in 1988 and moved to London. In his work Eric creates an escapist world that is populated with imaginings, fantasies and phantasms. These build into a landscape of excess, pointing to and shattering the mundane details that prop up everyday life. His objects of desire flex and morph into figures that dissolve into abstraction. Eric draws inspiration from the minutia of the everyday that he uses to obsessively feed his practice; things buried in the fabric of the everyday world unseen, ignored and overlooked by the eyes of ordinary passers-by. By nature Eric is an admirer of all things “unrealistic and sometime impractical” and his work expresses this; he swims against the tide of banal suburban life and pushes against the regimented “realistic” sensibilities and expected practicality. Music is in his paint. Eric “gets dirty” by muting the daily bombardment of images and news and tuning into the soundtrack in his head, freeing the paint to literarily explode in vibrant colours, forms and energetic, frenzied lines. Eric’s opportunistically-observed creations await definition as eroticism and female forms voyeuristically emerge; skin, flesh, dark lips and sumptuous curves. Stepping back, other facets of Eric’s work begin to surface as he pulls this intimate erotic immersion into context; refocusing on our earth bound existence showing how “Beautiful but small, fragile and populated by billions of tiny creatures, earth is” and how “slowly but surely it’s been damaged by the majority”. Nevertheless, the artist still optimistically insists that we’re “definitely worth saving” and that “it is never too late”, thus kindling a hope and joy that penetrates the stormier more destructive themes that underlie his work.