Erik Gonzalez Brinck

Erik Gonzales (°1950, Santiago, Chile) considers himself an “art worker”: he must make art and absorb the experience that accompanies it in such a way that it moves him (literally) and transforms him as an artist.

Erik’s mission is to reinvent (re-create) himself over and over again, “feeling like a spring that has been compressed and is now stretching.” He puts his life force to work and tries to inspire those around him.

When he landed at Zaventem in 1996, he was determined never to drink alcohol or use marijuana again; these addictions had followed him for over 20 years. Today, he has been clean for 18 years. He has known Globe Aroma for 8 years and as a young retiree, he spends much of his time there. He also takes evening classes in drawing, painting and modeling at an art academy in Brussels.

For him, art is a matter of life and death. Thus, the figure of God and Christ from the Abrahamic tradition is at the heart in his most recent works. In a witty allegory, he explains his compulsion to make art and his process: “Making art is like being on the phone with God, he speaks to me and I create. So all my works are his. For Erik, art must be radical: behind his practice, he tries to humbly follow the steps of an apostle. With found objects, he is like “a fisherman who waits and does not know what he will find. Each fish is a surprise”.

Painting, assemblages, collages, pencil drawings and found object installations are the forms in which he expresses himself. The echo of the social and global harmony of Globe Aroma’s studio inspires Erik to use text in addition to a purely pictorial form of expression.

He would like to put the found objects “on a table and then knock that table over, not to break the objects, but because the way they get there on the floor will be perfect.” As an artist, he creates the coincidence necessary to get the viewer to think about what reality really is. He says little about the content of the work, “art must speak for itself.”

This text was born during a conversation between Erik Gonzales and Timur Zakharchev, which took place in 2022.