Erik Ortvad : 1917-2008
'The Toad - 1944
Even
though he then was one of the youngest abstract surrealistic painters, he
allready then had a past:
He has painted pictures, that are mirrors, that
easily deforms what surrounds us, and which deforms even the reality, pictures
that visions the reality almost without retouchings of that kind that habits
bring along. He has given up the habit and mania to the unaccustomed, he has
removed the varnish, the make-up, and has discovered, that the reality behind
the burgeois aesthetics has more colours than you may find on the palette. In
this way he found himself, because the varnish, make-up, the colours does not
only deprive us from our body our veins, the pulse of the universe and the
orgasms, but also our own life. One has to tear down the optical wall, which the
ambigous burgeois has set up, then there will be no more seperation between us
and the universe, than between
Ortvad has not been afraid of immediatly
to paint the panoramas, which was behind and in front of the wall. He paints
without blinkers, he paints globally, and one might dare to say that he is a
landscape painter in the universe which people inhabit. But what landscapes the
universe presents us to, like letters that open inwards ? Which landscapes do we
force on the universe with great expences, like architecture, or with a glance ?
He paints forests of fables and mountain rivers, which is the serpentines of
of the universal party, houses that stick to your eye, the blink of the eye
caused by the sun, the voices, the sound in the sky, the knives, the scars and
the prick of the light. He paints, while he gets close to something, that
advance, the way that you may experience by running on a winding road on a
mountain, over the villages, the towns and the time.
He denies to fold up
these panoramas, to match the burgeois pockets, in the contrary he unfolds the
visible - even worse to the burgeois, that goes down on their knee to the
Japanese garden.
Erik Ortvad paints with the sun after having painted with a
torch. He is right. We are not anymore in a theatre, We are by our selves.
Christian Dotremont
1950
About other Cobra artists
Piere Alechinsky
Else Alfelt
Karel Appel
Mogens Balle
Ejler Bille
Corneille
Christian Dotremont
Sonja Ferlov
Stephen Gilbert
Svavar Gudnason
Henry Heerup
C. O. Hultén
Egill Jacobsen
Asger Jorn
Erik Ortvad
Carl-Henning
Petersen
Max
Walter Svanberg
Anders Österlin
Cobra Bibliotheket 16 -
1979