When I first met Eric he roamed the streets of Oakland on his bike, sometimes with a video camera in his messenger bag. He wore tattered sweaters and skinny jeans, showering sparingly with eucalyptus dr. bronner’s soap. He smoked copious amounts of rolled cigarettes and ate vegetarian rice bowls. On the wall of his art studio, there was a poster of dinosaurs, and the floor was littered with found objects. Street cones, emblematic of passageways, appeared in both videos and paintings. Eric was searching how to get through to the other side. Images of ladders, holes, steps permeated everything. Personnages invited via costuming started appearing, masks and caftans obscured as much as they revealed. It was a time of Level to Level rolled paintings series, exploring the way we move in the world of our internal and external landscapes. The places were fantastical, a phantasmagoria of color and movement, difficult to enter.
Few years have passed since then and Eric now lives in Hawai’i. He is still searching how to get to the other side but now when we look, we know where we start: on a volcanic rock. The Koolau range, a result of an ancient explosion, is prominent in the iconography. Red ash of the earth and the explosive green of the foliage entice to look. What is he searching for in those mountain passages, in the play of light, on the surfaces of ocean waters? For a long time I thought he was searching for a lost childhood. The images would enchant me, caressing my soul yearning for an other worldly realm. Rock formations, bringing to mind Hawaiian ceremonial sites, served as portals to spaces where the psyche transformed. Eric always challenged to self-reflect, to ask how we look and what we see. The Hawaiian Emperor seamount chain is a range mostly underwater, and Hawaii that we see is only a small part of it. Eric’s art is like that, it attends to the visible and the invisible in us and around us.
I still think Eric is searching for a lost childhood but he is not just trying to uncover the lost magic of wonder. A new element appeared in his landscapes recently, a human figure in self-portraits. Interjected into tunnels of consciousness and architecture, that figure is at once singularly him and Everyman in search for his essence. The eyes of the man take us to the eyes of the child that saw everything. All of a sudden, the playgrounds of yesteryear replay in our minds as we look at his paintings. We start in Hawaii, the symbolic paradise and the very real mosaic of life and nature, and we move in direction of ourselves. We follow Eric through the currents, after the rainbows, into rock crevices and flower petals to discover missing parts of our emotions. The figure pierces us with questions, sometimes shocks with pain, before leading us to understanding our own inspiration. On this rock surrounded by ocean waters, Eric is searching not only for a child he once was and always will be within, but for the man he is today, and with him through his paintings so are we.