Erró – Astronauts

In the 1970s, intrigued by man’s excursions into outer space, Erró turned his attention to space voyages and astronauts. After some experimentation with astronauts as pictorial subjects, he had an opportunity to visit NASA’s base in Houston, Texas. Full of eagerness and admiration he imbibed all the information and pictorial matter he could, observing astronaut training and getting leave to don a space suit.

From 1974 to 1981, Erró created a number of collages, later to become paintings, in which he juxtaposed astronauts, space vehicles, and distant planets with modern sci-fi comic strips and elements from familiar historical artworks by the likes of Rogier Van der Weyden, Ingres, and Boucher.

Erró’s Space series is neither single nor simple but is a composite of many different suggestive factors and symbolic elements that together form a layered and fluid semantic field.